


The Domesticities

by hes5thlazarus



Series: Fen'Harel's Teeth [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fen'Harel's Teeth, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Grief/Mourning, POV Solas (Dragon Age), stepfather!Solas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:00:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 24,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24493156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hes5thlazarus/pseuds/hes5thlazarus
Summary: Solas adjust to a new, gentle love that has gripped his heart and will not let him go: a Lavellan who heralds a world he did dream of, and learns how to survive grief and his own betrayal, learns how to surrender the high moral ground and focus on the domesticities.A series of Solas-POV ficlets from my story, Fen'Harel's Teeth, where Lavellan is a mother and leader in her own right, and barely keeping her head above the water of her own deep grief. Not in chronological order!
Relationships: Female Lavellan/Solas, Fen'Harel | Solas/Female Lavellan
Series: Fen'Harel's Teeth [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1698484
Comments: 30
Kudos: 37





	1. At Skyhold

He is watching her speak to the girl from the Edgehall alienage and admiring her body language. Lavellan is angled towards her, hugging her arms to herself, but tapping her face thoughtfully, smiling. He had not seen her smile much, since Haven. They are commiserating over something, but not grieving, finding something in to laugh at in the horror of the past month–leaving the homes they had built, leading their people into a ruin, and trying to shore up the sick. Vaea is grinning up at her, gesturing widely, and Lavellan covers her face as she laughs.  
  
“Oh, da’len,” he hears her say, “all of it? When did the hallucinations stop? When did you _realize_ you were hallucinating?”

“When Uncle Coran’s vallaslin starting vining all over our house, I guess,” Vaea said sheepishly, and Lavellan openly laughed, a sweet bell rung over the wind. Solas smiled. He hadn’t heard her laugh so openly since they visited Val Royeaux. He watched her put her hand on Vaea’s arm, telling her something, and when Vaea walked away he approached. She was watching her leave, her smile fading into something more resolute, but he took a second to admire her profile. Her nose was more prominent than the Elvhen, but he liked the sharpness of her face. He would enjoy carving her, and watching how time would fail to wear away the determination in her look.

He paused before her, and she turned slowly to him, a smile tugging at her lips. “Solas.” Her shoulders relaxed and he moved in closer, perhaps a bit too close. She looked up at him, and he saw the bruises lack of sleep left around her eyes.

“You’ve done well, settling in the refugees from Edgehall,” he said. They both leaned against the stone palisade.

Lavellan sighed. “We’ve set up the infirmary in the cellar, since it’s the warmest, but we’re still spilling over to the hall…and while House Cadash promises the lyrium will arrive within the next two days, the mages are run ragged, trying to work their healing.” She touched his arm, left her hand there. He did not pull away, but he did not pull her closer either. “I’m surprised to see you out of the infirmary.”

“I needed a walk.” Millenia ago, before he raised the Veil, knitting together these quicklings’ wounds would have barely taken one of the People sixty heartbeats. Time was still difficult. The slowing of his body was difficult. They had been wrong to name them shemlem; everything moved so slowly, now. “It is remarkable how you and Josephine are managing provisioning. I expect the mages will eat their weight, keeping up with the pace of casting.” He looked at her mischievously, and leaned in closer. “Have you eaten yet? Would you like to see what the kitchens have to offer? I’ll have to return to the infirmary soon.”

“Are you inviting me to steal from the kitchens with you?” She was grinning now.

“I am inviting you to tour _your_ kitchens with me. This is your Inquisition and your castle now, my love. And if the cooks notice that you’re looking particularly longingly at a dish, and if you decide to share–well, that is only a measure of your benevolence.”

“My _benevolence_ ,” she threw her head back and laughed at that. She took his arm, and they began threading their way back through the fortifications, Lavellan greeting people she knew absently. He was pleased to see she knew so many of those who had flocked to her banner, and remembered their names. One of her nephews, the part-dwarven one, gave them a sardonic look as they passed. He said something in Dalish that had her shaking her head, but still, she did not let go his arm, and he pulled her in closer in one of the narrower passages, to avoid an irritated looking Blackwall and an amused Iron Bull, who were attempted to move a long table. Wisdom had told him to endure: that this world, as it were, had worth, and he deserved to enjoy it, it was right to enjoy what good there was left. Before they made it to the kitchen door, he pulled her into an alcove and wrapped his arms around her fully, and she laughed and raked the back of his neck with her nails as she pulled him into a kiss, and when they broke apart he murmured, “You were gone when I woke this morning. I wondered if you slept at all.”

Lavellan sighed. “We’re working on our strategy for Adamant. It helps that Celene and Gaspard have declared a ceasefire, and we have stabilized the Exalted Plains enough to march our troops with little hassle, but there is still so much to do. These Circle mages have little experience in rough terrain, and while the recruits from Edgehall are eager…” She shook her head and touched his face gently. “I wish I could have stayed longer. Thank you for making breakfast for the girls–they like your cooking better than mine, I think. I’ll make dinner tonight, if you don’t have plans.”

Guilt struck him–she had so little time for her children, she had so little time for herself, because of this, because of his mistakes–giving Corypheus the foci, raising the Veil, failing to corral the Evanuris properly in the first place. If Elvhenan had not fallen, they would not have to worry about time. “I want to make this all easier for you,” he said somberly. He had caused all of this, he had laid this burden on her shoulders. “If I could carry any of this for you…” He hesitated. He should tell her, he knew. It was not right.

The kitchen door opened suddenly, and they stepped into the shadow quickly as Sera bustled by, carrying a whole pie. They exchanged a glance.

“Perhaps we should hurry,” he suggested. “Before we get blamed for whatever Sera just did.”

Lavellan frowned after her. “I caught her saying something about feathers to Leliana this morning. I think they’re planning something passive-aggressive against Gaspard’s representative…it would be better not to know.” She looked at him. "Do you think Chef Mhairi finished that batch of loukaniko? I’m certain she wouldn’t mind us…checking on it. As long as we left some for the others.”

He pushed her gently towards the kitchens. “If we act fast enough, she’ll think Sera took it.”

“Dread Wolf sees you, Solas,” Lavellan chortled. “I thought it was Mathalin who was blaming it all on Sera. Does that mean you took the jam too?”

Solas only laughed, and they took the loukaniko, and ate all of it, too.


	2. after the nightmare

The desert strips his throat and leaves him cold. He is very close to the town where he was born, buried under eight thousand years of dirt. Lavellan has sent Blackwall, Vivienne, Sera, and Cassandra back to Skyhold, after the battering they took in Emprise du Lion. Things are tenuous, tender, and he feels raw under her gaze. They all see him now, what he is and what he has been, and it is odd to be himself, all at once. During the long, slow healing in Suledin Keep, they all trickled in, to talk and to blame and to ask, and months later the Inquisition has adjusted to the new normal, as ever they do. A Dalish mage bearing the mark of their human prophet? They can accept it. A darkspawn magister ripping open the Fade? With enough trebuchets, they are certain they can face it. An ancient elvhen trickster god attempting to rip the world apart and, in the raw chaos, forge it into what it was supposed to be? They forgive him. He can hardly accept it himself, but they forgive him, and that, he supposes, is the most just revenge. He hates himself worse, because of the magnanimity of his companions. He denied their personhood, and they prove their worth over and over again, as they give him room to grieve and move on. But where?

He almost died of thirst here, he remembers, in the first empty days awoken from uthenera. He had expected the cool, quiet woods he had roamed as a child, before the war. Now, though, he has enough of himself restored to appreciate its austere beauty. The stars remain unchanged, he reminds himself. Both moons are full in the endless night. It is cold and the sand gets into his footwraps, no matter how tightly he ties them, but Lavellan is incandescent in starlight, and one night, she takes his hand when they sit by the campfire, listening to Varric’s stories, and it is the first time she has touched him in front of the others, since before the Nightmare, and it is the first touch since the Nightmare that does not feel desperate. He laces his fingers between hers and holds on tightly. At this age, he knows grace when he sees it. Wisdom told him to endure, that he would find what he was looking for. He had never known forgiveness to come so easily; perhaps it is because their worlds are so irreconcilable, that the only way forward is to endure.

Their clasped hands garners nothing more than a raised eyebrow from Dorian and a sudden, agitated move from Cole. But Varric keeps speaking, weaving his own tale: a story about his friends Fenris and Isabela, hunting slavers in the desert, and Isabela looking for a lost ship.

The heat edges into the night and they separate into their own tents–Bull is too big for the communal one they used in the early days, when it was only him and Varric and Cassandra and Lavellan roaming the Hinterlands. Dorian slips into Iron Bull’s, making a face at the smirk Lavellan sends him. Varric takes off his shirt as the sun comes up and pulls out a leatherbound book. He wants to finish the story as if Isabela had found the ship. Cole begins to hum. Solas closes his eyes slightly: he knows it, it matches the pulse of the lyrium he and Mythal had found in the Deep Roads, uncorrupted. The stone sings, and Varric writes it into the sunlight.

As the dawn melts the waves of the dunes, Solas reaches for Lavellan. He has never been good at self-abnegation, and recently he has learned not to punish others for drawing out his desire. It is a lesson he should have learned as a much younger man. In the daylight, he hold her close, and though she is surprised, she does not draw away.

“Let’s go to bed,” she says, and he follow her to their tent–because, somehow, between eight thousand years and reality torn asunder, from their worst nightmares reenacted to the cold corrupt torture of Imshael’s red lyrium farm, they are _them_ again, he is Solas first and Fen’Harel as well, as she is Lavellan and the Inquisitor too. They strip, and she helps him with the bandages on his left leg, checking the new scar, where Dagna had ripped the red lyrium from his flesh. It is angry, and the cold has been making it ache, and the incipient heat will make it worse, but it does not sing. He continues to live, still Solas, still Fen’Harel.

They curl up together, and Lavellan traces a frost rune onto the canvas above them. They are too tired for sex, they are comfortable enough with each other to admit it. She flexes her left hand, the Anchor flaring, and Solas pushes himself back up. “Is it hurting?” he asks. There is not much he can do until they retrieve the foci. He is afraid it will kill her before they find it.

“Just stiff. Go to sleep, Solas. It’ll be a long ride tomorrow.”

“Mm.” He lays down and pulls her toward him, and she sighs and rests her head on his chest. He does not understand how this is happening. Nothing is as it should be. Lavellan, as always, proves his worst assumptions wrong. He tells her idly, as her breathing slows, “I was born not too far from here.”

Her eyes snap open. She pauses and thinks before she speaks, “I had assumed you were more…formed than born.”

“I had a mother and a father,” he says, amused. “Procreation has not changed particularly much in the past eight millenia, I assure you. Though I am glad the People has abandoned our practice of binding curious spirits to our children’s souls. I might be an easier man, if not for Mythal’s Pride.”

“I cannot imagine you ever being _easy_.”

He laughs shortly. “True. But this place was Mythal’s, once. We called it Durglas Durgen’len–the Valley of the Children of the Stone, where they found us and we traded with them. She had me at her temple here, and gave me to my father to raise. A forest used to tower here, until the sand ate away at its roots. She needed the wood for the mines.” He sighs. “And then nothing could take root.”

“Is there anything left?” Lavellan asks tentatively. “Something of her temple?”

“We can look.” He presses a kiss to her temple. The heat is coming in, despite the spell she has cast, and Solas is curious to see what time has made of these wastes. It is new, to be eager for tomorrow: to see what is left. “I love you,” he says suddenly, in Common. He does not know if the Dalish is different than his Elvhen, and he is trying. How does one prove to their lover they will not burn the world down? He is figuring it out.

Lavellan says, “I love you too, ma’ishan. Dream well.”

He wants to say, I will dream of you, and see the hope in those enslaved elves’ eyes when you came flashing in, sending them to their freedom. I will see your legend born, and if you manage to sleep, as now you seldom do, I will show you my father’s studio, and the woods where I played when I was a boy, before the war. I will give you every dream, if you just say the word. But Lavellan rolls onto her side and pulls a blanket over herself, despite the heat, and he knows she will not sleep.


	3. Lahtaras

He has not felt this rooted exhaustion, pulling at the edges of his physicality, since his first war. He is utterly overwhelmed: by the weeping, the sleeping, the _being_ of her, and Solas looks at Lavellan and the child and feels like his heart is physically attempting to leap out of his chest. He cannot tell where the fear ends and the elation begins; it is all slumped together into the exhaustion, but by the third week Lahtaras seems to have understand how to feed, and she grabs back when he touches her, and she seems to recognize him and she squeals sometimes, and the fear is unknotting into elation. He drifts, half-asleep, with her curled into his chest.

Meanwhile, the world wags on. Lavellan is reading reports and plotting troop movements with Cullen, at her desk in their quarters, while he soothes the baby. He is taken aback by her equanimity, but of course this is her third time around, and the first time in relative physical safety. Skyhold is impregnable; he regrets the pun when he looks at his daughter. He didn’t even know he could _have_ one, with the world so changed; it was rare for the People to have children, before he raised the Veil, and the humans of the Inquisition express their surprise at his and Lavellan’s surprise. He thought he couldn’t have one, she thought she still had another year until she had to worry–but the Breach has disrupted more than the order of the seasons and the reflections of the Fade.

“We’ll need to finish securing the Dales,” Lavellan says, “before we move onto the Korcari Wild. And I’d like Orzammar’s support secured before we engage Corypheus directly in battle. Suledin Keep was a disaster. We will not have that happen again.”

Cullen frowns. “They want you to investigate the tremors in the Deep Roads personally, Inquisitor. Are you sure you’re…recovered enough?” Lavellan glances at Solas, who looks away, trying to hide his worried expression.

“I’d like another month. In an ideal world, I’d like an entire year. But,” she looks rueful, “I decided to have a child in the middle of war. And I was raised on halla-milk. As long as we’re not gone for more than a few weeks…well, no matter. I’m certain Solas can cope.”

Can I? he almost says aloud. She laughs at the face he makes. Lahtaras is beginning to doze off. He holds her closer. “Between myself, Bull, and Cole, I’m certain we’ll be fine.” Lavellan stretches her arms out and he gently shifts their child into her arms. Mercifully, she stays asleep. Cullen is smiling at them.

“She’s getting bigger,” he says.

Lavellan hums slightly as Solas leans against the chair, an arm around them. “She’s beginning to turn into a person. What did Sera call her? A worm?”

“With ears,” Solas says drily. “A grub with ears.” He has his hand on her shoulder now, and with the baby resting in the crook of her arm, Lavellan drifts her free hand to hold his. The moment is quiet. It feels eternal. Solas hardly notices when Cullen takes his leave, but he notices nonetheless.

“She’s going to grow so much,” Lavellan says sadly, “while I’m away. Don’t you dare miss a minute of it.”

“Come back as quickly as you can,” he says. He bites back the anxiety surging through the tiredness: don’t leave me to raise her alone, foreigner in a foreign land, I have only the dead to offer her, and I cannot survive if you pass, too. I do not know the limits to my endurance. I am not like you.

She looks up at him. “I won’t die, Solas. Don’t be so grim.”

He tries to joke, “I thought you liked that….” Lavellan grimaces.

“We should go to bed,” she decides. “While she’s still sleeping. She’ll be hungry soon.”

He passes a hand over his forehead. “I…do not think I have entered the Fade in two days.” He watches her bite back her usual swear–by the Dread Wolf!–and she says, “By the Herald, Solas. No naps? _I_ napped. I don’t remember when. But I did it.”

It takes him a second to process what she has said. “By the Herald? Really?”

“I caught Scout Harding saying it on the battlements,” she shifts the baby in her arms. “Can you take her? My shoulder’s getting stiff.” Lavellan cautiously shifts her into his arms as she rises from the chair. She flexes the hand with the Anchor. The pregnancy helped with stabilizing it, but it still aches.

“I thought you disliked these rumors of your omnipotence.”

“At this point, I’m trying to find humor where I can. Didn’t you, when Mythal elevated you?”

Solas pauses. That was so long ago. He feels unmoored in time, awash in the slight raspings of his daughter’s breath. “That was millenia ago, I don’t quite–” He remembers annoyance at the mural of the Wolf at her petitioner’s hall. The People forgot what he looked like. She needed him to be discrete, but he rarely stayed long in wolf form. “I was too harried to take a moment to laugh, I think. They forgot my name quickly.” Lahtaras stirs and they both lean forward anxiously, but she sighs in her sleep and snuggles into Solas’ chest. He feels like he is melting. There are tears prickling at his eyes. Who could reconcile Fen’Harel with this? Time is so different now: so fast, so slow. Elvhenan feels both six millennia and five years away. Lahtaras will never speak his language naturally.

“Are you alright?” Lavellan asks softly, as he cradles Lahtaras closer. She wraps her arms around them. “You’re upset.”

“I wish I could slow down time,” he says. “I wish–in Elvhenan, children were rare. We would not be expected to share our time with much else besides her. I wish I could give her–my whole self, the attention she deserves. I look back at the white nights I spent as a youth and wish I had that energy still. There was a market, in Arlathan…” he trails off, remembering the stall with the constellations dancing over a bassinet, he had purchased it for an old friend, what had been her name, Marella, one of Mythal’s guards. What had come of her child, after the fall? She had named him Adahlfenor. He hadn’t liked the name, or her mate either, why? Nuvis had not seemed a productive type of angry. “A friend of mine had a son. I bought them a bassinet that had the constellations dancing through it, to keep the baby entertained. I wonder if Dagna would be able to enchant something similar.”

Lavellan presses a kiss to his tired eyes. “We can ask in the morning. I won’t leave for another three days, at least.”

“How are we doing this?” he wonders aloud. “You’re so–unphased by this.”

Lavellan laughs, quietly. “Two nephews, a niece, and two daughters. If I stop to think about it, I won’t be able to do it at all.”


	4. divinity

He can hear the elves singing a mass to Mythal from Lavellan’s rooms. It is so wrenchingly like the past that Solas has to grip the windowsill and breathe, because he had sung the alto as a child, moving onto the baritone as his voice settled. Some things carried through the ages, though the voices were not so crystalline-trained. He had been a fool to think the People lost, and he gripped at his heart because grief and shame were mixed anew in that prayer.

The moment passes. The men by the Vhenadahl begins to sing the profession of faith, of upholding the courts of Mythal’s justice. He remembers that same idealism, as a young initiate, recently released the army. There had been no motets to the Dread Wolf, thankfully, and they had only built the one temple, his sanctuary, right before the revolution–and he had commissioned himself to do the paintings, because none of the court artists actually knew what he looked like, they all assumed he was literally a wolf. Small mercies, he supposed: it had made waging the revolt much easier. Solas shakes his head and practices the same advice he so often gives to Cole: the feel of worn linen against his skin, the wooden floor under his feet, the smell of silty earth after the rain and the incense Lavellan burns at the little shrine to the dead. He can still taste the wine he had with lunch, a decent table wine from the clan’s own vineyards, and he sees the house she has built and left these long years with the Inquisition. Solas had thought, optimistically, that perhaps he would be able retrieve the foci within a year–but travel without the eluvians is long and tedious, and Corypheus was better entrenched in the Western Approach and the Dales than they had assumed. He has been four years with the Inquisitior, almost three with the Inquisitor. It has been a long time, waking up to a new world.

The Keeper had taken over her rooms, after the temple was razed by the Wycombe guard. Still, Lavellan said, Deshanna had kept it mostly unchanged, though she had stolen most of her clothes. There are books everywhere, many new-printed, from her own printing press. Her first husband’s gitar still sits on the chair in the corner of the bedroom. There are charcoal lines in the hallway, marking the girls as they have grown. The kitchen has Sylaise’s vallaslin painted over the stove, and there is a Ferelden-style statue of the Dread Wolf outside the doorway. He touches it as he leaves, copying a gesture he has seen many of the People do. He does not what it means. Lavellan tells him it’s just habit.

Outside the chorus is finishing. A small crowd is gathered outside. Sera and Rainier are across the square, at one of the cafes that seem to be a mark of elvhen culture now. He crosses to meet them, and Rainier pats the chair next to him.

“Seen the Inquisitor anywhere?” Rainier asks. “She said she’d give us a tour of the harbor before dinner.”

Solas has not seen her since she slipped out of his arms this morning, jolting him from the Fade and into a different realm entirely. He had been watching the last stand of Warden-Commander Senaste. He had reached for her, still disoriented, and murmured, “A better sight than the Blight,” and she had pushed him away, smiling, saying that was the smallest compliment any woman had ever received, but no time to try again, the council was convening officially with the Inquisition, and she had promised Josephine she would meet with her to go over names and greetings.

“She’s been with the council,” he says, and he waves at a waiter to bring another bottle of wine. Wycombe has been called the revelry capital of Thedas. This reputation extends to its Dalish towns as well. “How have you been liking an elvhen town, Sera? Is it as ‘backwards and boring’ as you assumed?”

Sera snorts. “Fuck off with that, yeah? It’s whatever, I suppose. The singing’s nice. Thought Lady Inky was exaggerating about the music thing, but nah. It’s like being in a play, but the blood’s real. Wish people spoke Common more, everybody keeps going ‘aneth ara, lethallin’ this and ‘dareth shiral’ that. But the wine’s good. Antiva, yeah? Woof.” Solas notices Rainier hiding a smile at the look at his face and grimaces slightly. Sera, as usual, is a quick mixture of sharp insight and self-hatred, but Cole is not present to be compassionate, so he must try. Well. Not too hard.

“That is the first Elvhen I have heard you speak, lethallin,” he says. “Perhaps you’re going native.”

“Not ever!”

He rolls his eyes. The waiter comes with a bottle and a glass, staring at him curiously. “So you’re the Dread Wolf,” the girl says. She looks like she wants to poke him, to see if he’s real.

“Yes,” he says flatly.

“How’s that going for you?”

Clan Lavellan and its religious practices bemuse him. This child bemuses him. He considers the question: how has being himself treated himself today? He has not wept. He has bemoaned the past. He has drunk some good wine, and listened to a prayer that he loved. No one has tried to burn him alive today, a welcome change from the new normal. “It could be worse,” he admits. “No one has stationed me outside the town walls, yet.”

“You’re on our side, aren’t you?” she asks. “Besides, I’d like to see Mythal herself try and take down First Lavellan. She’ll kick any back to the Sundermount and back.” The girl hesitates, and then blurts, “Why don’t you have hair?” 

Sera giggles and chokes on a snort, and Rainier looks at him eagerly. Whatever he tells her will go through the rounds of Dalish clans of Thedas and end up so twisted he won’t be able to recognize himself in it. He settles for the truth: “I made a bad bet,” gambling that Mythal would be safe bait to lure the Evanuris out, that they wouldn’t attack her when they realized she had betrayed them to him, that they wouldn’t raze her cities in rage, trying to find him, that he would have a better way to mourn, beyond marking his appearance. Shaving his head in shame and grief was the least he could do, before the Veil.

“There’s a story behind that.”

“Yes,” Solas says sharply. “Wonder.” She gets the message and leaves. The church-goers have switched to the Chant of Shartan. This he does not know, this he will not sing. He wonders what the people have lost, in surviving, in continuing to live, and he reminds himself: the world he was born into changed before the Blight. He is not alone, just translocated, and he does not live his life in translation. This glass of wine is here, Sera and Rainier joking about the waiter are here, and soon Lavellan will saunter by and place her hand on his shoulder, and they will walk to the harbor and she will tell them some abbreviated story about her time with the Carta, and when they return to her room, alone, he will ask her, “How does it feel, to become a god? Your people have more faith in you than Mythal.” He has enough faith now, to know he will enjoy her answer.


	5. a lack of portraiture

“Hey, Chuckles?” Varric asked. Solas glanced behind him briefly, but continued to sketch the charcoal outline of his last panel. “Why don’t you ever paint people?”

“I do paint people, child of the stone,” he said sententiously. “Look around you.”

“Yeah, well, it’s all very…stylized. And no one we actually know. Or like. You threw in Corypheus, Empress Celene–is that supposed to be Briala or whatsherface, the one who killed her, Justine?”

“Florianne,” Solas says, exasperated. “Though they be our enemies, we cannot deny their personhood. And–what do you think?”

“I think I’m mad you painted that Abelas guy, who you don’t even like, before you painted me,” Varric countered. “You haven’t even done the Inquisitor. And you _loooove_ her.”

Solas smiled despite himself. “I do. But this is meant to be a monument to how she, and the Inquisition, has shaped the fate of this world. For the people, not the personal, Varric.”

“And what’s this going to be?” Varric gestured at the grand charcoal swoop he had just made.

“Mythal,” Solas said shortly, and turned back to the mural.

“Just that line?”

“Apparently, unless you leave me be and let me finish.” He paused. “Though this lack of portraiture is not from want of trying.” He smiled slightly, and moved to the desk, shifting papers around to find it. “If you want to see…” His name was Pride, and he was proud of some of the work he wrought, though he did not regret the revolution, only that it had failed, and he was learning not to regret that he had not died with it. Few of his frescoes had survived the fall of Arlathan, but he was proud of these simple sketches. Varric came closer and Solas flipped through them, showing him: a quick sketch of Iron Bull’s mutilated hand, Vivienne in profile sneering, Cassandra and Varric laughing. Varric paused at that.

“Is that really what I look like?” he said. “Is that really how I look at her?”

How many times had he explained this? “Reality is more flexible that you assume,” Solas said instead. “I only wanted to capture the look–but even our eyes are different.” He flipped the page, and was slightly embarrassed: it was just a study of Lavellan’s lips, the way both the vallaslin and the scars cut into the bottom lip. He traced where he would draw the curve of her nose.

“Why don’t you paint her?” Varric asked. “I had a blast writing about Hawke. Realized a lot, about everyone, myself, even _Bartrand_ –you’re always going on about the multiplicity of the Fade, why don’t you try too?”

“Because I do not want to be the one who decides how she is remembered. I have marked her fate enough.”

A rare silence fell upon the rotunda. Solas turned away, returned to his wall, and began filling in the outline of Mythal’s wing. Varric was watching him. Finally, the dwarf said, “Well, shit. I don’t think she’d mind–”

“She would,” Solas chuckled slightly. “She does. And I do, too.”


	6. gratuitous time loop self indulgence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An AU of an AU of an AU. This was written for my partner. We have three Inquisitor: Imladris, mine; hers, Tara, a rebel mage; and our joint creation, Tara's religious extremist little sister, Brigid. Check out our story He Who Hunts Alone for context.
> 
> The idea is: Solas wakes up in the Brigidverse, after an ideal happy ending with Imladris, where they're happy and have a kid and are winning the revolution. He's not pleased.

He remembered: towers of crystal and steel threading effortlessly through the trees, bridges as thin as the wind weaving the People through their cities. He remembered processions, parties, fights. Under the grandfather of this tree he had killed an informer, what was his name, Variel, ostensibly escaped from Andruil but actually sent by Ghilan’nain. Solas remembered. He could not forget.

There should have been more color, the stones should be clean and shining clear of moss, the paths should be gentle on bare feet. “These woods have changed much since last I was here,” he mourned. He touched the wall, cold stone worn smooth, still younger than him. Imladris had taken him here, four years ago and never, before they knew Lahtaras would come. They had slipped away from the camp, promising the scouts that they would be back before the next watch, and enjoyed the lushness of the grass under their feet. He told her about the last of his people, Sulan in particular, the ones who still fought for the dream of Fen’Harel, against the aristocracy of Halamshiral, uniting the People too late against the Chant. She had joked about him fucking her against one of the wolf statues, which he had found both arousing and distasteful, and she had laughed at the face he made, kissing away the comment he had made about “Dalish caricatures.”

The wrong Inquisitor, Brigid Trevelyan, was taking them to the Din’an Hanin, which she insisted on referring to as “the elvhen ruins,” as if the entire continent of Thedas were not the shattered remains of Elvhenan. Solas bit his tongue. Brigid was attempting to court his favor, after an explosive fight, where he had baited her until she finally crossed the line and punched him. He had been pleasantly surprised she had not backhanded the “mouthy knife-ear”--though he had never heard that insult from her, he had to give her that. He was struggling to be just, when he had seen what could be, what should have been.

They heard the fighting and smelled the crackling of electricity before they saw her--a single elvhen mage, beating back the venatori. Solas tensed--he recognized the taste of the magic, he knew her, he had known her, and he hurried past the Inquisitor to see a the mage summon a spirit-blade as long as her body, and slaughter a Templar Behemoth with five swings of her sword. He knew that marvelous spirit, and time for one stilled because he had not killed her, she had not perished in the Conclave then, chance had not taken her, and that meant this world could be redeemed, because if she was clawing her way through the Emerald Graves the revolution he had started had not faltered. An arrow bounced off his armor, hard, and he stumbled and ducked, called the Fade to him and forced reality into a fist, scattering the archers, and he felt her shock and stare before he saw it, did she remember?

The dust cleared, red lyrium bodies shattered about her feet, Imladris wiped the blood off her stave and straightened. “Well, this is unexpected,” she said. Solas looked at her with longing, waiting for her to indicate if she knew him, what she knew. She glanced at him and cut her eyes away. “I should thank you.” Her voice was different, more Dalish, she had always spoken with a very careful educated accent, she had only relaxed when they were with her family, alone. “I am Lavellan of the Dalish, First of my clan. And I suppose you are the Inquisition.” Solas stilled, she could not know that, none of them were wearing the insignia, and she looked at him again, quickly, and hoarsely he asked, “How do you know?”

Brigid glared at him, likely thinking he was being rude, she once had the temerity to lecture him for not doing enough for the “elves,” as if she approved of any sort of enfranchisement, or even an independent elvhen state. “You dealt with those venatori handily,” she complimented her. “I am Brigid Trevelyan, Andraste’s Chosen and the Inquisitor. These are my companions--Solas, Cassandra, and Sera. It’s unusual to see a Dalish around here. I didn’t know there were any clans in the Emerald Graves.” Solas, irritated, looked down and away and pressed his lips together to keep himself from snapping about why, exactly, there were no longer any elvhen in the Dales. He tried to keep himself from staring at her, arranged his face, watched her from the corner of his eye.

Imladris caught his eye. Her left hand flexed, she made a sign, but he had never bothered to learn Dalish sign language, they never had the time, he was so focused on getting her to fluency in his own tongue, one of the many selfish demands he laid on her, he looked away. Perhaps it was better, if she did not know him, with the mistakes he made.

Brigid was still speaking, he had tuned her out, “...you’re welcome to return to camp with us, and tell us what brought you here. Any enemy of the venatori is a friend of the Inquisition.”

“Am I?” Imladris asked, amused. “I hardly know you, Inquisitor. Have you met many Dalish?”

Brigid was very solemn, very mannered, like the Free Marcher noble she was. “No, I haven’t had the privilege--though I met one of your people, a Keeper? A Keeper named Hawen. He and his people were very guarded.”

“I imagine,” Imladris said blandly. “They are stuck in the midst of yet another one of your wars, and the Orlesians have killed three Dalish clans this past five years. But you have two of my people with you--”

“Your people,” Sera exclaimed, disgusted, “ugh. I’m just people, don’t know what people you’re talking about, elfy.”

Imladris looked amused rather than annoyed. His heart leapt, wouldn’t a Dalish first be outright insulted at that? Especially one so proud as her, she had hated Sera when first they met. She had not liked him too much, when they first met. “As you say, da’len. And you?” She regarded him, and he loved the bright brown of her eyes, the green paint she kept around them, as camouflage.

Solas said hopefully, experimentally, “Ar dirthan'as ir elgara, ma'sula e'var vhenan.” She had not understood that, when he first told Sera that, to see how much of the Elvhen still remained. Afterwards, she had asked him why he was talking so intently about the state of his soul--Dalish caught some of the intent, but little of the meaning. 

She started. “Ane silenas?” His heart stopped.

He said slowly, unable to tear his eyes away from her face, “Dirtharas Lahtaran? Silena ahn?”

Imladris raised a hand slowly to her mouth. That was the answer he needed. His hands were shaking. Brigid, uncomfortably between their very intense staring, said, “So, you two know each other then?”

Solas ignored her. He said, in Dalish now, “I thought you were dead. At the Conclave--”

“I missed it,” she replied in kind, and a smile was growing across her face, mirroring his. “My ship docked late. I thought, with the world so changed, it killed you too. Or that…” she hesitated, glanced at Brigid.

“Yes,” he said heavily. “I worried, too. I didn’t want to--disturb you, if this had trapped only me, I didn’t want to presume--”

Cassandra cut in brusquely, “Perhaps this could continue back at camp? The scouts are expecting us to return before nightfall.” She paused, looked at Imladris, and blinked. Solas felt the Veil stretch and twist, then warp back. Whatever recognition passed there flicked out. Imladris frowned.

The Inquisitor led them back to camp, and Solas and Imladris slowed down to the very back, as Sera complained about not finding anything interesting at the graves. Solas only assumed it was because Imladris had gotten there first, not trusting the Chantry shill to do the only just thing. They ignored the occasional curious look the others gave them, as Imladris trailed her hand into his, and they laced their fingers together tightly.

“My love,” he said, “where do you think we are?”

Imladris looked up at him. “I was hoping you knew. I assumed this was Mythal’s doing--that we’re trapped in the Fade, physically perhaps, or that one of Dorian’s spells went wrong. Do you have any clearer idea?”

Solas sighed heavily. “No. I hope this isn’t real.” He paused at the irony of the statement. Imladris stopped and he could feel her pulling away, so he held onto her tightly and said, “It is more bearable now that I know you are here. I would not do anything...rash without--” He stopped, and as the rest of the Inquisition rounded past a rock wall out of view, he pulled Imladris closer and kissed her fiercely, hoping as always that he could convey what he could not articulate that way. Her hand drifted to his neck, nails sinking in, and she ground into him. He pressed her closer, hands firmly planted on her ass, and she laughed against his mouth, all teeth. When they broke apart he rested his nose against hers, eyes closed. “I love you,” he breathed, “I couldn’t…” She was shaking, and this time she pulled him in again, he wrapped her arms around her.

Someone coughed. Cassandra was smiling slightly at them, arms crossed her chest. Solas and Imladris readjusted their hands as subtly as they could, but did not let each other go. “I did not mean to interrupt,” Cassandra said. “But we lost track of you.” 

Solas moved his arm around Imladris. She was grinning, her hand fisted lightly in the fabric of his shirt, and she rested her head against his shoulder. “We’ll catch up,” she said. “Don’t worry.” She smiled up at him, and Solas felt tenderness wash over him, loosening his limbs, and a tension he wished he had not carried released its hold on him. He had hated Brigid. He had hated the emptiness of pretending not to understand those he had considered his friends. He had hated wanting to rip the world apart once more, doubting the reality of those around him, slipping into solipsism and wondering what exactly, if any of it, was real, had ever been real, if he were Solas or Fen’Harel, Solas of Arlathan, Lahtaras’ son, or Solas, the Inquisitor’s lover, father of her child. Perhaps it would be easier to sort, now that he knew she had existed, that the dream--of building a better world, of comradeship, of the red-haired baby who would never speak her father’s language with absolute fluency--was real. They were real.

“I see,” Cassandra said, lips twitching. “Take your time.” She turned on her heel and walked briskly back towards where Brigid and Sera were undoubtedly waiting. Not quite out of earshot, they heard Cassandra squeal, “That was so  _ romantic _ ! I must tell Varric!” Solas chuckled. Some things stayed the same.

“I wonder what they think of you,” Imladris murmured, brushing a hand against his cheek. He made to kiss it. “The elvhen apostate, distant but unfailing polite, until some fool challenges his notions of freedom for all free-willed creatures--and then you’re always ready to fight.”

“Would you rather I bite my tongue?”

“Never. I like that you cannot help but draw attention to yourself.” She wrapped her arms around his neck loosely. “I like your outrage and your sorrow. I like how you refuse to be humiliated--to be humbled.” Imladris sighed. “It hasn’t been easy, without you.” He gripped her close, remembering how closely to the edge she lived before his actions swept this world--running from safehouse to safehouse, trying to keep her children safe, striking hard and fast against the Duke of Wycombe and whomever Briala set her against. He forced his hand to be still, she hated having her face touched. He knew why. It was appropriate, in this Blighted world, that the best the People produced was happiest, healthiest, and safest when being hunted by a human mage with delusions of grandeur. Without Corypheus, without him, Imladris remained a leader of her people--but disposable everywhere else.

“Vhenan,” he said, and he searched for words that normally came so easily to him. “My heart. I do not know how I have kept quite sane, without you. That woman,” his face twisted, “is a fool. Vivienne has her on a leash, and she tugs her along like one of those frilly yapping bitches--”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you use that word, Solas.”

“It’s not meant as an insult,” he protested, and he took her hand. They began walking, slowly, in the direction of camp. Night was falling gently in the Emerald Graves. He was smiling. “She believes she is the Herald of Andraste, despite what the Nightmare displayed. She allied with the templars! She fully restored their order, despite witnessing--and being  _ victimized _ \--by their corruption firsthand.”

“She’s young,” Imladris said. “She’s a noble. She’s not a mage. Wasn’t she promised to the Chantry? She has no real experience of the world. I was surprised she was...so polite to me.”

Solas snorted. “When she remarked that it was unusual to meet Dalish in the Emerald Graves, at the graves of the Emerald Knights--yes, I suppose that was polite, for Brigid Trevelyan.” They were nearing the camp now. He noticed the glow of the fire up ahead. They slowed down again, walking in step.

Imladris asked, amused, “Why are you taking her so personally? She was polite to you.”

Solas stopped her. “I do not think you realize the effect you had as Inquisitor, my love. There are very few of the people in the Inquisition ranks, as it stands under Trevelyan. I have been called a knife-ear to my face by the nobles she courts, and Josephine does little to correct them. Cassandra has had to intercede to ensure Dorian and I remain unmolested by the templars--they wanted to take phylacteries. The mages of the Inquisition have been forced to double-ward our bedroom doors, for fear of what the templars would do.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose, right between his eyes. “I never feared for my life in Skyhold. Not when it was mine, not when it was yours. Under her banner, it is hostile ground.”

Imladris was silent. She pulled away. “Then perhaps I should not follow you to camp.” He grabbed her, desperate to keep her close, and she started at the violence of his grip. “Solas, please--” He released quickly, backed away.

“Ir abelas,” he said, “ir abelas, ma vhenan, ma emma lath. I’ve been going mad. I thought waking up from uthenera was the worst misery I ever faced, but this--I built a life, my love. We built a life. And they do not remember--they are not--Blackwall does not remember facing down Imshael at Emprise du Lion. Dorian doesn’t remember those long nights with Fiona and Vivienne, arguing about Veil warp and Fade-mapping--he and Iron Bull aren’t together yet, and the two of them were tripping into each other’s tents even before we went to Adamant. And Cassandra--” He stopped and swallowed. “I am sorry. Perhaps I am being unfair. I thought losing everyone once was my...worst nightmare, but this--aping through the days, with the ones we love having no memory of us--I would prefer oblivion to this.”

Imladris’ gaze softened, and she touched his face while she looked away. “I don’t know,” she murmured. “Do you understand what you’re asking of me? If you’re afraid for yourself, do you think you can protect me too?”

“Please,” he said. He was not too proud to beg. “Please. Do not leave me. Do not leave me to die another death, alone with them. I will...I will take my leave of them, if you want--I am certain this Inquisition can function quite well without me, and we can devote our time to understanding exactly where we are, and how to get back...I cannot rebuild my life again, vhenan. I cannot whittle away the rest of eternity, pretending that you, and Lahtaras, were only a pleasant dream. Please.”

Imladris planted her hands firmly on his shoulders. “Solas, calm down, my love. You’re shaking. I haven’t seen you this agitated since Mythal drew us to the Crossroads. I’ll come to the camp with you. I have what I came for, anyway--Briala won’t grudge me an extra day. And perhaps you can return with me? We’ll figure this out.” More quietly, she said, “I can’t think about Lahtaras. I couldn’t think about what I lost. Five years, and the world so changed--I thought it was a dream. A fever. A distortion of the Fade, because of the Breach. Alternate worlds, careening into each other. It’s cruel, if we can’t go back. I don’t like this either, Solas. But we don’t have enough information to act, we have to live with it for now..”

“Or we can fix this,” he said, a hard edge to his voice. “We had a daughter, Imladris. I want her back.”

“Solas, don’t. Please.” She withdrew, and he could see he was making her nervous, she was upset, he was upset, they had thought the other dead, they had thought the life they built a lie, what had happened to their daughter? He took a deep breath, steadying himself, recognizing this for what it was: desperation. He had let go of the past, his entire people, the survival of his culture, so this world may live--but that world was a better one, Imladris had made it beautiful.

“I cannot lose the world twice over,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He shook his head, moved away, and caught something--a flash--of a worse world, where their nightmares had not revealed themselves. Imladris looked angry, she was getting scared, and he could see her chewing over words, worrying at the consequences, damn the consequences, and he said, “We need a plan.” She relaxed visibly at that. “I will not do anything rash.” She snorted. “You promised me when we first met--when I was but a stranger to you, and not a particularly civil one--that you would protect me ‘any way you had to.’ I promise you the same. We will find what game Mythal is playing and upend it. I want to go home,” he said, a hard edge to his voice. “I want to wake up to Lahtaras in her crib. I want to come down from our quarters and greet the day with our comrades, and see what Dorian makes of all this--”

Imladris wiped tears away from her eyes, and he cursed himself for his loquacity, speaking helped him, but she needed some truths to pass in silence. “I’ve missed them,” she said, “I’ve missed you. It’s been bad, my love. We beat back the venatori only for Starkhaven to invade. Deshanna sent me to Briala for my own safety--whatever that means, now. I haven’t seen the girls in months, I left them with Manon in Val Royeaux, but there’s been a crackdown on alienages across Orlais since your Inquisitor solidified Celene’s hold. At least you left us the eluvians. I didn’t see you at the Winter Palace.”

Solas closed his eyes, pained. “I could not convince Josephine to take me. She is very wary of me, here.” Josephine, who had been so curious and kind, who had reminded himself of what he had wanted to be as a young man, in Mythal’s service: her suspicion had hurt him. He had thought her genuine compassion and thirst for knowledge would outweigh her bigotry. Of course, hadn’t Imladris thought that of him? That his compassion and love for people, any people, all free-willed beings, would outweigh the necessity of redeeming his catastrophe? “What do you want us to do?” He always enjoyed hearing her plans.

“I’ll stay the night with you. But tomorrow, I’m bringing the account of Red Crossing to Keeper Hawen. And then--the Korcari Wilds.” Imladris smiled crookedly. “I am going to demand justice from Mythal. Because whatever she’s done, she has damned us all, twice-over. She’ll be intrigued, at least. She’s always liked audacity.”

Solas was silent. “Well, it’s a plan.”

“Do you have anything better?”

He made a face at her, and she laughed lightly. He reached his hand out and she took it, they laced their fingers together, and walked around the bend and down to the Inquisition camp.

They could hear them laughing before they saw them, and Imladris tightened her grip on Solas’ hand as their former fellows looked up, in grinning fascination. Thom. Varric. Sera. Cassandra. Iron Bull. Cole. Brigid was sitting a little apart, sharpening her daggers. A hush fell upon the camp. The fire crackled, shadowing them all in chiaroscuro embers.

“My apologies for being delayed, Inquisitor,” Solas said blandly. “I hope you did not have too much trouble returning to camp.” He sat a bit away from the fire, and Imladris followed him. She nudged him, and he smiled slightly at her. “I suppose introductions are in order. This is my partner,” wife, “Imladris Ashallin, the First of Clan Lavellan. We were meant to meet at the Conclave, and both assumed the other killed in the wake of the Breach.” Not a lie, they deserved better than a lie. Let them assume his phrasing a quaint archaeism, from a man who learned all he knew about this world from its reflections. He turned to Imladris. “And these...I’m certain you’ve heard of their exploits.”

They all introduced themselves, hungry for the diversion Solas was providing. He had become numb to being a source of their merry japes, as long as they had not known what he had lost, they did not know how to be cruel. He never understood Sera and Blackwall’s fascination with his sexuality, as if intelligence precluded him from sensuality. He did not want Imladris to be the butt of their mockery. But she stared at them all coolly, unflinchingly, and only Sera did not have the shame to disguise her surprise. They shuffled to make room for them around the fire, but the two of them stayed put, angled towards each other. He had learned these people through her. Now he understood why she had not wanted to see them. How were they surprised? Varric, Cassandra, and Dorian had watched them come together. This felt wrong.

“So you thought the other dead,” Brigid said. “I understand why you were so shocked at the ruins, Solas. Why didn’t you say something?”

Solas said, “I did. In Elvhen. Not to you.” Imladris looked at him askance, brushed his hand, a reminder to play nice.

Imladris added mildly, “You must understand, Inquisitor, the need for caution. Your Chantry has never been known for its kindness to the People or our mages. Why would he be with you people willingly? Once I knew you weren’t going to throw me in the Circle, or execute me for my gods,” she was gripping his knee now, but it was his bad knee, and he shifted a little, “once I knew he was with you willingly, then I could be a little free. You people separate families from each other. In your circles, you separate couples and their children. It is always better to be discrete.”

Brigid was clearly uncomfortable. She cleared her throat. “Well, I’m glad you’ve decided to stay. Solas and I have our disagreements,” she  _ punched _ him last week, “but the Inquisition stands for all the Maker’s children. You don’t have to fear us.”

Imladris raised her head and considered her. Solas thought about the damage Brigid had wrought: allying with the templars, losing the Grey Wardens, allowing Starkhaven to invade Kirkwall. He thought about the rage and despair in Briala’s voice, as the guards attempted to drag her off. Imladris Ashallin, once Inquisitor, First of Clan Lavellan, said, amusement clear, “By the Dread Wolf, da’len, I never brought up fear. Why would I fear you?” Solas saw she genuinely wanted an answer, to see if Brigid would listen to herself. Brigid had realized she had overstepped last week, but he had little faith in her capacity for change. He stepped in.  
“Inquisitor. I believe I had told you that I would stay to see the Breach closed, but it has become clear that with the arrival of Lady Morrigan, you have no need of my particular expertise.” He glanced at Imladris, and softened slightly: she was alive, she was so beautiful, so fierce, so proud. Mythal had called her bright. He thought she shone. “Indeed, it was a mistake to tarry so long. I will be taking my leave tomorrow morning.” He thought about Adamant, about the leap into the abyss. Perhaps this would make things better. Perhaps this would make things worse. Perhaps, for once, he needed to do the right thing, rather than what was necessary.

Brigid said, simply, “I see. Then I’m glad for you, Solas. I hadn’t realized you had lost someone to the Breach.”

“Shucks, Chuckles,” Varric said, shaking his head. “I knew you were hiding a tragic backstory, but I wasn’t expecting a whole dead wife. Shit.”

Imladris corrected, “Living. I still have a pulse, for what it’s worth.”

“Tiralas gasha ma,” Solas said. My whole world. She smiled at him, mouthed: sweet talker. They moved in closer to the fire, and he put his arm around her, rejoicing in the heat of her. They had a plan, not a very good one, but his plans had never been particularly watertight, just borne of necessity.

Iron Bull said, “Guess I owe you a sovereign, Varric. Sure as hell thought it was something darker than that. Like he’d murdered a carriage full of children or something.” Blackwall stiffened. He had not left for Val Royeaux yet, if he would at all. Solas was slightly curious if he would stay true to form, and how Brigid would respond. They were sleeping together, despite the age gap and clear difference in life experience--though he should not be so critical, Imladris was over seven thousand years younger than him. At least she was well travelled. At least she had been a leader, a scholar, a soldier. At least she had known betrayal before. At least he had not been her first, or even most important, love.

“I assure you, Iron Bull, I don’t make a habit of killing children,” he said. “And neither does my wife.” Though they had both done so.

Cassandra was blatantly staring at them with adoration and fascination. “How did you two meet? Do you have children? How long have you been married? What  _ is _ an elvhen marriage ceremony like? How did you propose?” Cassandra stared at him furiously, then turned to Imladris. “ _ Did _ he propose?”

Cole said, “Cold, freezing frightening ripping up from the inside, the song ringing in his bones, I won’t let you die here, not like this. Dawn breaking, bloody light, bandages stiff but flesh knitting back together unscarred. If I can walk after this I will not walk away.” An awkward silence fell upon the group.

“Well,” Varric said eventually, “we’re just gonna let that pass by without comment. But seriously, Solas, if you’re leaving, you have to leave us something to gossip over. You can’t just roll in, reveal absolutely nothing about your personal life for  _ months _ , and then run into your long-lost  _ wife _ and expect to get away with it.”

“I thought she was dead,” Solas said repressively. “There was nothing to reveal.”

  
  
  
  


“You’re not dead,” Cole said. “Just sleeping.”

“What?”

Solas woke up, suddenly, to Dorian twitching over his moustache, right in his face. He pushed him away. “How did it go?” Dorian demanded. “What did you see? Did it work?” Solas put his head in his hands and breathed shakily. The familiar sounds of Skyhold filled the rotunda. Fiona handed him a glass of wine. His hand shook so violently he spilled it, and hurriedly he placed it on his desk, where the shard still hissed. Dorian put his hand on his shoulder. “Are you alright?”

“What did we do?” Solas asked. “There was--there was another Inquisitor, but Imladris still remembered.” He closed his eyes and folded his hand over his heart, which was palpitating. “That was not the Fade, Dorian.”

“Hm,” Fiona said. “My theory of splintering universes is correct, then. Aren’t we happy we didn’t send him through the eluvian?”

“If we sent him physically through, we’d be able to pull him back physically too,” Dorian said defensively. “We might have needed another Dreamer, and  _ much _ more lyrium, but--ah.” Imladris was storming in, Lahtaras curled at her side. Solas breathed a sigh of relief, and lurched towards them. Imladris grabbed him, and he clung onto them for a second. Lahtaras began to whine. Recollecting himself, he took her.

“That was decidedly unpleasant,” he said, cradling the baby. “So you were pulled in as well?”

“ _ I _ was taking a nap,” Imladris snapped. “Whatever you cast, the Anchor dragged me there too. I dreamed--was that another world? That  _ wasn’t _ the Fade.” She glared at Dorian. “Next time you want to experiment, don’t drag me and mine into it! Travelling in time was unpleasant enough, I want to stay  _ exactly _ where I belong.”

Solas said slowly, “I wonder if we can use the eluvians to map these projectings--to spy on these splinters, as it were, in a way that did not involve one’s personal consciousness. If we can distill a memory has a foci--”

“Like binding a spirit?” Fiona frowned. “The ethical implications--”

“My friends,” Imladris said, exasperated. “As fascinating as this discovery is. We are not risking our lives over this--or our actual reality. Try a piece of fruit before sending Solas and I across the scatterings of time and place next time, alright? Wouldn’t it be easier to mirror possibility by using an inanimate object, anyway? What spell did you use?” Solas hefted the child in his arms and listened with interest as the mages speculated. Out of all possible worlds, this had to be the best one. Lahtaras tried to chew on the leather of his necklace, and he pulled it out of her mouth. He could explore possibility without sacrificing this world.


	7. old forms, new movements

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> finished binging avatar: the last airbender and decided that’s what thedas looked like before Solas raised the Veil  
> Solas interacts with a romanced Lavellan’s daughter, in a world where Lavellan shames him into admitting he is Fen’Harel and his role in Corypheus’ plans. not all is well, but it’s getting better.

Solas is canvassing the forest outside of Skyhold’s walls, looking for the royal elfroot he planted when they first arrived, when he sees them: mother and daughter, slowly moving through an old martial magic form. He can feel the manipulation of the Veil as both pluck and twist at it, and pull the Fade between vibrato and out of their bodies as a thin flame. He pauses and watches. Before he raised the Veil, the fire they summoned would have been hot enough to melt the snow about them. But Lavellan carefully guides a thin whip, and slows to make sure her daughter can copy, and does not hurt herself. Internal burns are the most difficult to heal.

They move through the Dragon’s Dance. Now, the earth does not tremble, the trees do not shake, and the forest stays decidedly unburnt. At the end, mother and daughter face each other and in unison exhale, breath sparking. “See?” Inquisitor Lavellan, Imladris Ashallin, says. “This is what I meant by discipline. If you stay calm, if you remain in control over your breathing, you don’t need a staff. Even your breath can be a weapon. You can feel the energy move through your body, can’t you? The movement helps guide it, but it’s your breath that controls it. And it’s your mind that controls your breath.”

Mathalin holds out her hands and closes her eyes. Imladris smiles and clasps them. Solas understands suddenly that he is intruding as he feels them both casting their energy down into the earth and probing outward, and the two turn around to regard him, Mathalin unhappily, Imladris neutral. The two are tense. He almost steps back, but doesn’t. Pride goeth before the fall.

“I didn’t know the Dalish still preserved those forms,” he comments. It is the wrong thing to say. Imladris turns away from him and pulls her daughter closer.

She tells her, in a language she thinks he does not know, “Well done. I’m proud of you. You caught on faster than I did, at your age. Of course, you have a better teacher than I did.”

Mathalin looks away. “You don’t have to flatter me.” She slips out of her grasp, and Imladris says, “I wasn’t…” to her retreating back. Solas steps out of her way. Mathalin glares at him as she passes. He feels guilty, he always feels guilty. Though they generally get along, as much as any middle-aged deity and teenaged girl can, Mathalin has so little time with her mother, and Solas has been monopolizing enough of Imladris’ time as they prepare to confront Corypheus at the Arbor Wilds.

“You should go after her,” he says.

Imladris is watching her daughter make her way back to Skyhold. “Later. I’ve been drilling her since dawn.” Her eyes move to his face, and she says, “It’s not your fault. She’s been angry with me since Halamshiral.” He reaches for her hand and they watch to make sure Mathalin makes it safely through the gate. “She thought I should have brought her, presented her as my daughter. Or at the very least, snuck her in as a servant to spy.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Imladris looks up at him. “Sera already harvested the feladara you planted. She baked them into those ‘pride cookies’ she was throwing at people last week.”

Solas takes a moment to mourn the loss of the very potent high he had spent two months waiting for, and then says, “Don’t try to deflect.” He grasps both of her hands now, and Imladris smiles despite herself. “You are upset. What is the matter?”

“Mathalin’s forgetting her Orlesian Dalish,” Imladris says. “Which her father taught her. Mirwen barely knows any, not enough for her to practice. She thinks I’m keeping her away from her father’s heritage. As if I didn’t want to send her to her grandmother, rather than risk her safety in Skyhold.”

“Ah,” Solas says, to say something. One does not learn how to be a stepfather in the Fade, and it was not a position he ever found himself close to before entering uthenera. He had been a mentor before, distant and perhaps a little cruel. This was uncharted territory. “I could talk to her, if you like.” He can wax poetic about cultural alienation for hours, though perhaps a sixteen-year-old girl would not be the best audience.

He finds Mathalin moving through the same firebending form by the barn, too fast, too jerkily. The surgeon is watching, frowning. He sees the moment where the child unbalances herself; her breathing hitches, her left foot lands slightly off-angle, and both he is across the field and pulling the fire out of her before it explodes out of her skin.

“Da’len,” he snaps, “man’itha.” Child. Watch yourself.

She gasps–she’s burnt the inside of her mouth. The surgeon hurries over and clucks her tongue. “Dalish,” she shakes her head. “Needs more discipline.”

“She’s half-Orlesian too,” Solas responds. “And your people aren’t known for their…restraint, either.”The surgeon rolls her eyes and hands Mathalin a waterskin, who drinks eagerly.

“Tastes like chilies,” she croaks.

“You’re lucky you can still taste,” Solas says. He’s exasperated. Surely he was not this foolish and stubborn, at her age–and then he remembers he was much worse.

“I didn’t know you were from Orlais,” The surgeon says. She narrows her eyes at him, attempting to add Fen’Harel, Arlathan, Orlais, and his general lack of exuberance and coming up with contradictions. Solas pauses and glances at Mathalin, who looks away.

“The Inquisitor’s first husband, Mahanon, was from the Val Royeaux alienage,” he says carefully. “I am told that both Mathalin and Mirwen resemble him closely.” And pointedly, they do not resemble him. What was it that Felassan said? Mahanon was so lively, always had a blush in his cheek–quite unlike your corpselike pallor, lethallin, Imladris needs to leave you out in the sun a bit more, you look like you belong in the Mire. 

“He only died eight years ago,” Mathalin says. “You can’t strike him from the historical record yet.” Solas winces. The surgeon takes that moment to make a tactical retreat. He does not blame her.

“I’m sorry,” Solas says. He offers her a hand to help her up, but she ignores it, and springs unsteadily to her feet.

“It’s fine. Not your fault they think we all look the same.”

Solas snorts. “Yes.”

Mathalin crosses her arms. “Did my mother send you to talk to me?“

“No, she wouldn’t be so foolish. She thinks she should leave you alone.”

“She’s done enough of that, my whole life.” Mathalin starts walking toward the battlements. Solas follows her, to make sure she does not fall. Imladris should not have been pushing her so hard. He waves at Thom as they pass. The children of Clan Lavellan–Mathalin and Mirwen, Imladris’ daughters, and then her nephews and her niece–all like him, mostly because he takes them as they come and treats them as seriously as they deserve. Mathalin in particular is bright, and proud, hot-tempered as her mother must have been, like a blade before it is tempered. He has always been fond of her, since he found her hiding under his desk, avoiding lessons at the Chantry–even when she decided to test Skyhold’s wards by launching her younger sister from the rookery, he laughed, once his heart started beating again. They are taking the long way towards the Great Hall, along the ramparts. He waits for her to speak. “I know it’s not on purpose. My dad always said she was trying. That she was doing it all for us, when she’d go away on a caravan, or a hunting trip, or–I guess a lot of those were assassinations.”

Solas is silent. He remembers how hungry he had been for Mythal’s favor, when he had first risen in her service–as if those moments plotting her wars could erase the long years she had spent away from her people, raiding with Elgar’nan, as if that could soften his anger that she had made him and dropped him off and forgotten about him, and as soon as he had made himself interesting, she had whistled and he had come running like a trained hunting dog. Imladris is a better mother than Mythal, by far; she has never enslaved any of her children. But leadership and parenthood are difficult hats to juggle.

Before they get to Cullen’s office, Mathalin turns to him. “I’m not mad about that, though. She thinks I am, but I’m not. I’m mad that I get to spend all this time with her now, and it’s only because she’s been made Inquisitor. It doesn’t matter that my father was killed, as soon as she was able she went back to the field.” Solas winces and hopes Mathalin has the sense not to tell Imladris that. “Nothing short of a global catastrophe can get my mother to straighten out her priorities. And now, it’s just too much. She won’t let me go anymore. Most elves my age are starting their apprenticeships–Knight-Commander Helaine told me she’d teach me the Way of the Knight-Enchanter. Ambassador Briala asked me to join her guard. Keeper Hawen even said he could use a younger mage to help with banishing the demons from Var Bellanaris. And, well, my grandmother could always use help.”

Solas marvels briefly at how mother and daughter can utterly misunderstand each other. He and his father had understood each other very well, though Lahtaras had a calmer temperament and a more disciplined nature. He had always been clear about both his affection and expectations: “If you are going to contradict yourself, synthesize it. Discordance brings a greater harmony. Try not to die a slave. Don’t forget that you are one. They won’t.” He wonders what Lahtaras would say to this, what advice he would give.

“She wants to keep you close. Keep you safe,” he says. “She’s afraid you’ll be captured by Corypheus. She’s afraid Briala will hold you hostage. She’s afraid–”

“But I’m not.”

Solas chuckles slightly: youth. “She’s your mother, da’len. You should tell her you need to make your own way–she will be more understanding than you think. But perhaps you should master your forms first. She will breathe much easier, if she knows you will always have the dragon’s breath to protect yourself.”

Mathalin pauses. “I suppose you’re right. Please don’t tell her I burned my mouth.”

Solas fails to point out her face is sunburned. She needs to learn, after all, and leaving Imladris and Mathalin to yell and cry it all out, he absconds to the barn, where Thom and Iron Bull are drowning their sorrows and playing a terrible game of Diamondback. He cleans them all out, and, after his seventh drink, Arlathan brogue eating half his words, lectures them sententiously that children really do only learn if you shout at them, and it’s best if you can set it up so someone else does the shouting, he has a reputation to keep.


	8. do not jest about your death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> trespasser, in a world where Solas does not leave

Lavellan came back late from the opera. Josephine had invited her to a party, but the Anchor had begun tensing and twitching and pulling halfway through the show, and she was not sure she would be able to pleasantly grit her way through the pain in a roomful of shemlem nobility. A few of Briala’s people escorted her back to her suite. When she opened the door, she saw Solas was still up, grim in the candlelight, waiting. She grimaced and closed the door gently behind her.

He was across the room and helping her into a chair before the pain wracked through her frame. She gasped as her hand spasmed and the acrid smell of burning leather filled the room. It was burning through her gloves.

“Fenhedhis,” Solas cursed. “What were you thinking? You know we have to change the bandages every six hours.”

“I was at the opera,” Lavellan said shortly. “And I couldn’t find a place private enough during the intermission to change them. I thought it would be fine. Is the leather–is the glove sticking to my skin?” She was too frightened, too disgusted, to check for herself.

Solas’ frown deepened. He carefully traced down her forearm. “This will hurt.” He led the magic through her arm, and she whimpered as he pulled it out of her palm. Still holding her arm, he gestured at a pitcher and drew water towards them, cooling down the burning leather and blistering flesh. Carefully, he peeled the glove away, then what remained of the bandages. Lavellan was shaking at the end of it, and sighed in relief and exhaustion as he wound new wrappings around her fingers, across her palm, up her arm, tightly.

“Better?” he asked softly. He was staring at her hand. A faint green glow still shone through the bandages.

Shakily she pressed her head against his shoulder. “Yes.” He put his arms around her, and helped her shift out of the chair and onto his lap. Little comforts. “Good thing I managed to get here in time. The Orlesian court would have adored for me to get sick at the opera: the Inquisitor, blown apart by her own hand, in the midst of the l’opera du artelier metellior–”

Solas stiffened. “Do not jest about your death. You are not…” his voice trailed off.

“I am dying, Solas. I only hope we’ll deal with the Qunari before I’m totally incapacitated.”

“There must be another way. There is always another way.” He rubbed her shoulder, working gently at the knots. “I know you do not want to consider amputation–”

“I don’t want to have this conversation right now. We don’t have the time for me to recover from an amputation–when the Blight is seeping out of the Black City, when the Titans are awakening, when the Qunari decide now, right now, is the best time to throw the entire continent into chaos–”

“You do not have to throw yourself into every single battle,” Solas snapped. “You do not win a war by fighting to the death in every battle. You do not have to hold the line in every single war. There are others in our fight. You need to take care of yourself. If not for your own sake, then for mine. Mathalin and Mirwen have already lost one parent. Do you think I can raise them alone? And we know Mythal will come for Lahtaras. I cannot protect them without you.”

Lavellan flexed her hand and grit her teeth at the stiffness. “Fine. I see your point. Let’s revisit this after the council. I would rather not face the great powers of Thedas delirious and missing an arm.”

Solas looked amused. “I was not suggesting we do it now. And I would prefer to have Anders, and perhaps your brother, when we do attempt it.”

Lavellan snorted. “Just take me to bed. You would have adored the opera Josephine took me to, by the way. There were at least three duels and two sets of twins, and one time travel subplot–and the scenery, I think the artist had seen your frescoes at Skyhold, but the balance of the colors was totally off…”


	9. before the kiss

He has understood that he has been drawn to her for months. At first, he dismissed it as simple loneliness, touch starvation--Solas had spent time immemorial alone amongst the People. Fen’Harel could not have a lover, or a friend, or a comrade, without immediately subjugating them to the worst attentions of the Evanuris. Besides, he could not trust anyone when Dirthamen’s ravens were about. It was safer, though not easier, to remain in quiet disguise and keep moving. He was a poor and humble Fadewalker, after all, for all his pride. One thousand years locked in his own temple had not assuaged his desire.

Lavellan was clever, though a bit rude, and brutal in a way that reminded him of himself. She killed quickly and cleanly, and insisted on never leaving a corpse unburied. Solas liked her, despite the priggish Dalishness: she painted her vallaslin brighter whenever she felt threatened. But she was fierce, compassionate, philosophical, and even funny, and he came to enjoy when she’d come looking for him to argue her out her bouts of depression. It was rewarding, to make someone laugh, and for all her anger and sadness, Lavellan dearly liked to laugh. It was liberating to be around someone who was not afraid to bite back.

The attraction was a logical result of his isolation. She was the only elvhen woman with a mind around, and she was lovely, though she did remind him a bit of a street cat who once lingered around his father’s studio, when he was a boy. He let her touch him, and lingered in her space, just an edge too close by the fire in the long nights in the Hinterlands. They slept next to each other when they camped, though they were careful never to touch, and Solas smoothed the edges of her dreams when they touched his, and did his best to guide her and her little Dreamer to sweeter sectors of the Fade.

In the Fade, the spirits were fascinated by her. Duty, Fortitude, and Passion all elbowed each other to get a closer look. He was pleased when she proved so remarkable, Compassion found himself drawn into the physical realm, to bask in her light. He had never met anyone like her, not in Arlathan, never. Not even Ghilan’nain had drawn such a consortium around her. He liked her very much. He liked her too much.

When they brought her daughters to Skyhold, Solas expected Lavellan to withdraw further from the inner circle of the Inquisition. Instead, the girls attached themselves to him: Mirwen needed guidance in her dreams, that was true, and Mathalin was nervous around humans and the Circle Mages. He found himself coaching Mathalin through her first electricity spells, and teaching Mirwen to carve out her own little realm within the Fade. Lavellan drifted in her dreams to watch them. When they were all asleep at the same time, he helped brighten and strengthen their dream of home, and Lavellan smiled as the girls excited pulled him through their house, showing them: this is mamae’s room, this is the clan library, where Keeper sleeps even though she has a bed of her own, this is where we sleep, Auntie Olivine made us the bed, oh the halla always run through like that, that’s Suledin, mamaela’s favorite. He had had students before, and had looked after his comrades’ children on many an occasion. But this pride was something new.

The night before they left for Crestwood, when Skyhold was finally settled, she came to him in the rotunda. He was exhausted after a long day of drilling the new mage recruits, mediating between Fiona and Vivienne, and had been looking forward to falling asleep and sifting through Skyhold’s memories, seeing what had become of her since his People had left. But Lavellan said, “I was looking for you, Solas. I was wondering if you knew anything about Ghilan’nain’s Grove--now, the general opinion amongst the Dalish was that a monumental temple stood there, and was razed sometime after the Exalted March, but why would they leave the statues? Now, I think we sometimes give the ancestors too little credit, and...” They ended up on the couch, discussing what she had read and what he had glimpsed in the Fade, constructing theories as he tried to edge his way around the truth without overtly lying. She deserved better than that. She deserved the world.

He ended up walking her back to her quarters, despite the whispers. She paused before she opened the door, and he almost reached to caress her face. She looked at him gently and then pulled him into a hug, and he almost didn’t release her quickly enough.

Lavellan said, “Thank you. For looking after the girls. I know you prefer to keep to yourself, but I appreciate you keeping them out of trouble.”

“It’s a pleasure,” he said simply, and truthfully. “They’re clever, and curious--though I wish Mathalin had decided to ask me about Skyhold’s wards, rather than testing them by tossing Mirwen from the rookery.”

She winced. “What am I going to do about them?” she murmured, and he put his hand on her shoulder to reassure her. She smiled ruefully at him. “Thank you, Solas. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Temptation, sorely wanted, was easy to ignore in the physical world. It was more difficult to resist when two consenting adults shaped reality into the form they both wanted. She kissed him and he surrendered to it absolutely, and when she pulled away, shocked at her own daring, he laughed and pulled her close and then remembered:

“We shouldn’t. It isn’t right. Not even here.”

“Not even here?”

At that, he had to laugh. “Where did you think we were?” he said merrily. She dreamed him into being.

“We’re in the Fade,” Lavellan realized. She flushed, suddenly. “So this isn’t real.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Unless?”

“That’s a matter of debate,” he said hastily, “better reserved for when you...wake up.” He ejected her rather rudely from his dream, and touched his mouth, grinning. He made have been the first to deepen the kiss, but she had been the first to bite.


	10. a morning in the Hinterlands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a morning in the Hinterlands, after Val Royeaux but far before Redcliffe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> inspired by and lyrics drawn directly from “The Tatara Women’s Work Song” from Princess Mononoke: https://open.spotify.com/track/5siNTOCmjShPm7KtVSlFT2?si=6gVdYUg3Sq6_RHwb0yb86A

He wakes up to her singing as the dawn creeps the gray golden. The sourness of the realm sundered from the Fade sweetens, and heavily he rubs his eyes as he adjusts to the deadened sensations of his body. He is losing sensation as he ages in this world, but his hearing is still sharp, and Imladris Lavellan has a lovely, if untutored, voice.

She is banking the fire as she waits for the kettle to boil, and Solas stumbles into Cassandra as he exits the tent. Cassandra growls slightly, and he notices Varric already up.

“Morning, Chuckles,” the dwarf says. He looks irritatingly well-groomed. “Thought you’d never leave the Fade.”

“I was investigating the temple,” Solas says vaguely. He was attempting to track how many of his amplifiers were still functional, and conducting a survey in the Fade without the literal grounding of the physical realm was tedious at best, Sisyphean at worst.

Lavellan continues to bustle around the camp. She is singing in Dalish, and he can understand only the barest sentiment: Elvhen language is less grammatical and more contextual, and the new dialects are frustratingly opaque. They do not think like him. He cannot trace their meaning; her song falls muted on his ears. He sits down, a bit apart from Varric, and drags his fingers into the grass, digging them to the roots. He can barely feel it.

She pulls the kettle off the fire and pours it into a pot, and the bitter-earth smell of Seheron coffee fills the camp. Solas makes a face. Lavellan pours herself and Varric a cup, humming as she goes.

“What’s the song?” Varric asks her, as she throws herself next to him. Her moods are unpredictable: most of the time she is guarded and occasionally harsh, but in the mornings, she has not put her armor on, and Solas glimpses what she must be with her People, her children. She wakes up singing and grows quiet through the day.

Lavellan takes a sip from her coffee. “It’s a work song, it doesn’t have a name. Don’t your people have those too? Something simple a group can sing together, to keep focused while they work?”

Varric shrugs. “Deshyrs don’t do a lot of communal labor.”

Lavellan is amused. “I suppose. Most people in Wycombe know this song, though.”

Solas, despite himself, is intrigued. He had thought the People estranged from the Children of the Stone. It is another mark of the corruption of the elves of Thedas. They have more in common with the culture of the Stoneblind or the oppressed of the humans than their ancestors. Self-hatred stabs through him: and whose fault is that? Who destroyed the Vir Dirthara? Who sundered the Brethren of Air from the People? How could they not lose themselves, when he had stolen their very being from them? He asks delicately, “Is it a human song, then?”

Lavellan looks amused. She sings the song again, first in Dalish, then in Common: “Blow, bellow, blow: even a baby can push. Blow, bellow, blow: even a spirit can cry. The iron love of Lavellan women melts and flows, and steels into a blade.” She lets it settle on them, checking for affect, and then smiles mischievously. “It’s a war song.” She puts down her cup, and gets up and stretches. “Think I’ll scout the road ahead.” She leaves the men in silence, Varric abashed, Solas amused. If he were a younger man, he would have taken that as a challenge: but no, he had learned his lesson, to stop sleeping with people who introduced themselves by threatening him.

“And here I thought that was a lullaby,” Varric says helplessly.

"I think it still is,” Solas says, and laughs. He cannot help but be intrigued by her: she is always a little bit sharper than he expects. “A war song. And she says they all know it Wycombe.” He shakes his head and laughs again. 

Varric looks at him oddly, and sighs to himself. “Elves. Do any of you ever play nice?”

The grass is soft under his hands, the soil rich under his fingers. Solas wipes the dirt off his hands and onto his trousers, and reaches for the kettle: he may as well drink boiled water, better than that caffeinated swill. “No. My People never have. And it appears that we never will.”


	11. homecoming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> just wanted to write something, taking from my tumblr drabbles. not particularly good, but it's cute

Clan Lavellan’s name for Wycombe, Solas discovers, is the same as the Inquisitor’s: Imladris. In the Common tongue, the elves call it Rivendell, because the original elvhen city is hidden deep within the cliffs that tower over the Wycombe river delta. This is what the Lavellan have reclaimed: the remnants of the city, weaving up in the cliffs and around the trees, that encroaches on the alienage wall and close to the harbor. Solas thinks to himself, no: Wycombe encroaches on Lavellan land. There had been elves in what they call the Free Marches since before Elgar’nan threw down the sun. The people Imladris comes from spoke a different language than him, and he sees it in the strangeness of the names: Imladris, Baranduin her father, he meets one of her paternal aunts, a brusque woman named Ithilien, is everyone here named after a place?  
  
But her brother and sister’s names are Dalish, she gave her daughters Dalish names too, and those he understands the etymology of: her brother Freedom, her sister the Woman of Many Journeys, her daughters the Blood that Quenches and Tenacity. Revas, Ashara, Mathalin, Mirwen. Clearly by the time Mirwen was born Imladris had calmed down a little bit about destiny. Her mother’s name had been Ashalla, the Halla-Woman. He wonders what Ghilain’nain would think of the toothless protectress the People have fashioned her into, and smirks to himself. Then he remembers he will have a chance to ask her: the Veil is fading, regardless how the Inquisition labors to repair it. He knows his magic. If Corypheus had not ripped open Arlathan and released the Blight, the Veil would have lasted ten thousand years. He supposes he should be proud that it lasted almost a thousand.

Solas picks a path from the cliff ledge down the wooden bridge to the house Imladris built in the trees. Most of the inner circle of the Inquisition is staying there, sleeping on pillows and quilts she has stitched herself. He can hear them carousing, Rainier and Sera and Dorian and Ashalla bellowing a Dalish drinking song that is so simplistic he does not need to translate.  
  
 _Fuck, fuck, fuck_  
 _Drink, drink, drink,_  
 _Drunk, drunk, drunk_  
 _Eyyyyy!_  
  
It is not particularly creative.  
  
Solas taps one of the statues of the Dread Wolf flanking the door before he enters and smirks again to himself. Imladris pointed out to him that out of all the gods, he is most prominently displayed in every elvhen household and Dalish camp. Even despite Dirthamen’s propaganda campaign, he has persisted in his role as the Watcher–though the Dalish had him pointed away from the hearth. Imladris, he sees, has shifted the statues. They flank the door, facing each other. A smile grows on his face. A small thing, a small symbol, but still: she knows him.

He opens the door and steps into her home.


	12. fadewalker

Just because he sees it first in the Fade does not make it any less real. He tries to explain to his new contemporaries, again and again, how the world is malleable, how he had ripped it in two and how it was bleeding together again, but it unsettles Cassandra, disturbs Rainier, panicks Iron Bull. Varric only understands it through the pen he wields, but still stone is unyielding, but when they are gathered around the fire one cold night in the Hissing Wastes, Dorian turns to him thoughtfully and says, “So how do you know? How do you know that we’re as real as you are? If, in the Fade, this fire,” and he waves a gauntlet at the campfire, “is just as hot? Even though it’s just a reflection?”

“I don’t,” he says. “I think I am, but I myself am only one of Mythal’s better-wrought creations. Some of her guard thought of themselves as reflections of her Glory, and worshipped her and themselves accordingly. We would respond to shifts in her nature, of course, but we were ground in our own being too. I am Mythal’s Pride, of course: both her spirit and her son.” He thinks about his father, Lahtaras, sanding away at a marble pillar. “But I was Solas first, and that is what I will remain, no matter the fluctuations in the Fade.” 

When they go to bed, Imladris asks, hand on his hip and pressing him closer, “So when you see me in the Fade, is that of my own making? Or is it only your perception? Or just a conglomeration of both? And with the Veil fading, will I change? Will others’...perceptions shift my very nature?”

She has always worried about control. He lets her draw him in and presses a kiss to her forehead. She’s running a little hot, as always, and she looks away when he tries to brush the hair plastered to her face. “You are already changing,” he says, and when she tenses he hurries, “not metaphysically. Though I wondered, at first, with the Anchor...no. It is a mistake to think of us as beings, fixed in time. Time _isn’t_ fixed, what we are is always shifting. Didn’t this saying survive? Through the same river, the same diverse waters shift...you are you, whatever is done to you. Or whatever _you_ do. But you are all those things, all those things that could be, and converge in this moment and leave. And before I completed the Veil, it was always so. And now we can only see it in the Fade.”

“When we’re dreaming,” Imladris says, and she reaches out and touches his face. He turns to kiss her palm, and she pushes him down so she can make his way up his body, and he threads his fingers in her hair as she kisses him. It was a long day and they are sand-sore and sweaty, and he thinks distantly that he’ll just throw the tent into the nearest oasis to remove the stench of unwashed bodies and sex, and then he is only thinking about her and those discreet little breaths she takes when he does _that_.

He is dreaming, of course, but that does not make it any less real. His wandering thoughts take him to the ancient city of Imladris, more east of Arlathan than he is accustomed to roaming. The city winds itself above a river delta and laces through a narrow valley and into its cliffs, where a few dwarven thaigs still remain. The People of the Jewels, the Simaril Elvhen, retain better diplomatic ties with the Children of the Stone. He finds them utterly fascinating. The city is beautiful, of course--they pay tribute to June and Sylaise, though luckily the Evanuris mostly ignore them. Solas walks through the old stone streets that gently rise to the fall of his feet, and he feels untainted, young, whole. He catches his reflection in a bakery’s window, and smiles at himself. He is unmarred by Mythal’s vallaslin, but he still has hair, and it is red, tinged with gray at the temples--though cut short. The clothes he likes too: no armor, just leather leggings and a green tunic with gold edging, the pattern is new, something Imladris made, and the belt at his waist was a gift from Vivienne. The wolfpelt is old. He lost it long ago, but it dates this self-image. This is him winning the revolution, a lifetime ago. He runs his fingers through it: perhaps he will grow it back. He has always been impatient with it. Mourning had really just been an excuse to finally shave it, but perhaps it is time to move on. He imagines himself with a beard and laughs aloud at his reflection suddenly sprouting one: no. He could never take himself seriously, a glowering paterfamilias like Elgar’nan or even Rainier.  
  
Solas moves on and catches glimpses of life during his revolution: a young woman with June’s vallaslin shoving a girl with Sylaise’s, urgently speaking; a spirit of Fortitude handing out leaflets on a corner, wisps of Curiosity arousing more attention; and a man marked by June glowering at the edge of a rally, taking notes on the speaker for the police. This was just before Andruil went mad, then. He pauses to watch the cop: a waste of a spirit of Duty, he thinks, then reproaches himself, not wanting to tempt it towards corruption, though it should have known better to take a constable’s form. A woman is watching in term, and he knows her before he even looks at her: Envy.

“I’ve been thinking,” she says. He glances at her: she has the audacity to take Imladris’ form, both the city and the city’s descendent, his lover, Lavellan. She has kept Mythal’s vallaslin, but removed the scars. She looks less brutal and brutalized this way. He is angry, but lets the demon speak. “What you’ve been saying--about the past, and the present, and all possible futures being intertwined. It’s been bothering me. Especially when we found those venatori slaves.” Imladris would never refer to the captives they freed as slaves; this must be partly a reflection of someone in their party, likely Dorian. Envy touches her face, traces where a gash above the jawbone should be. “You know, at least in Tevinter they don’t brand their slaves. We do.” This is definitely a reflection of Dorian’s. Solas cools slightly: more irritation than anger. He waits. Why has she come to him, and not the other mage? Then she says, “I know you offered before, but I was wondering, could you still remove the vallaslin? Are you willing? Do you want to?”

Irritation is overwhelmed by shame. Solas takes a step back, and he is less what he wants to be and more what he is: no, he will not grow out his hair, the clothes are his usual sweater, and for a second Mythal’s vallaslin flickers across his face and disappears. Does he envy her that much? Would he prefer to see her unmarred? He could remake her, utterly, in his image. Horrified, he wakes up. The tent smells disgusting, and it is too hot--Imladris has rolled away from him in her sleep. Solas hides his fade in his hands for a moment, overwhelmed, and then breathes. Be better, Fen’Harel: your Pride was always your downfall. Now he knows. Imladris is resolutely shaped by her past, fixed in what she has clawed herself into: the Inquisitor. She wears her hair pulled away to brandish her brutalized face at everyone who would dare gawk, she paints her vallaslin brighter and copies out other clans’ patterns onto her limbs for state occasions. She has been hunting slavers in the delta of the city that gave her its name since her mother placed a staff in her hands. Lavellan, breaker of chains: she would never wish her vallaslin away. Solas sighs explosively and stares up at the cloth ceiling. A wind rustles the canvass. So he had made that, not Dorian. What does he envy? Her potential. Her victory. Her fate. She would be so upset, he knows, if she knew he would prefer her unmarred, without the vallaslin. The lack of scars was a nasty touch. The demon was less sloppy than he assumed.

He wonders how to translate this into terms she could understand: I dreamt I walked the streets of the city that gave you her name, and at a rally I met Envy in your shape, and she offered me the ability to play Fen’Harel again, to blend what has passed and what was lost into now, what you and I are building. And it was cruel. It was cruel to me, and worse to you, and I woke so I could see you.

Imladris shifts in her sleep, rolls over, and regards him suddenly. He starts. It is the very intense stare of one barely conscious.

“Yes?” he says.

She pats his face absently and falls back asleep. Again, he takes her hand and kisses it. If they have time in the morning, or perhaps tomorrow, before they drift to sleep, he will ask her: why do you fix yourself in the Fade with all of your scars? You yourself rarely shift.  
  
In the city you find yourself tracing the shape of the one you love, and you are wrong, because she cannot be bound by one dream or one city or one shape, she is her breath in your ear, the way her eyes cut across the room, the little sigil for protection she sewed into your shirt. When he sleeps again he does not dream of Imladris, neither the city nor the woman nor his Envy for her, but he drifts amongst the dunes of the Hissing Wastes, and instead he sees the terror and anger Rainier holds for the desert, and the man who died. When he wakes he mentions none of this to his companions, for how on this earth could he translate?


	13. a time of gifts

For once, there is quiet. Sera is quietly knitting by the campfire, and Cassandra is reading a book. Imladris has her own mending to do, of course; she ripped an undershirt in the last battle with a great bear. The woods of the Dales whisper softly in the dying light. She ignores what she must do to lean against Solas and watch the leaves shiver in the night breeze.

“What are you thinking about?” he asks her quietly.

She nuzzles into his neck slightly. “Nothing, I suppose.” She throws an arm around his shoulders and he shifts slightly to wrap an arm around her waist. They can relax a little, away from Skyhold, without the title of the Inquisitor between them. She peeks: he has his sketchbook open on his lap, a piece of charcoal out, but he has hastily thrown a hand over the page. “What are you working on?”

He snaps the book shut with one hand and pivots to hold her closer, hiding it behind him. “I’ll show you when I’m finished.” She is immediately suspicious. Imladris pulls away and crosses her arms, and Solas only smiles. “Later,” he says. Then he pauses, narrows his eyes, and studies her. Imladris raises an eyebrow back. “The Dalish make wooden jewelry, do they not? Pendants and rings and suchlike?”

"Well, like anyone, our craftsmen use whatever’s on hand to make something beautiful. We’re lucky that we have access to more metals, because of House Cadash...Clan Sabrae traditionally does woodworking, I think. Why?”

Solas looks bashful for a moment. He takes her hands, studies her fingers. “I’ve wanted to find a way to show you how much you mean to me.” He caresses her hand.

“You’ve already given me a castle, Solas,” she says, amused. “What more can you do?”

It is the wrong thing to say. She sees him pause, as if frozen in time, and lose himself for a moment in his sadness: everything, he is thinking, everything. Solas takes her hand with the Anchor. “It has not been hurting you, yes?” he asks.

“It’s been fine,” she lies, and kisses him. As always, he surrenders himself to her totally, and when they break apart she catches Cassandra grinning and looking rapidly down at her book.


	14. the crossroads

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Solas buries his dead.

Solas tells Leliana, “There are places I must see alone, before we bring new eyes to shape them.” He pauses. This world is not so mutable as the one that past. Still, he wants to the one who fixes the past into the future. He was meant to be the anchor.

Leliana looks at him sympathetically. “When do you think you’ll be back? And what do you want me to tell the Inquisitor?”

“I’ll be back before she returns, Seneschal.” Once again, he hesitates. He is not used to explaining himself. Before, he acted: and damned were the consequences. Now people want him at their table. He is expected to sit and make a good show of himself, to care and be cared for. Solas reminds himself that he actually likes Leliana, sympathizes with her, wishes her well. She reminds him of himself, when he was Mythal’s dog, and he wishes her a more successful trajectory. With that in mind, he says, “It should not take long, to lay them to rest. There were not many of us left, at the end.”

“If something happens, who should we send? Not Morrigan, surely?” He catches her eye and laughs.

“Don’t you dare,” he says. “Merrill, if you must. And Thom, or Bull, or Cassandra. Not her.”

“She used to be worse, if you can believe it,” Leliana says. “She used to like it when Mahariel was cruel. But Kieran’s softened her, I think. And she dresses better, since she’s been at court. As if she almost likes herself.” She sounds disapproving. A world where Morrigan likes herself is a world where Leliana has less control over her. Solas leaves her plotting how to destroy Morrigan’s newfound self-esteemed, glad he left the court and its cruelties behind.

The eluvian activates as soon as he enters the room. The one was one of Mythal’s. Lavellan told him that the clan Morrigan had stolen it from worshipped Dirthamen. If he sleeps in this room he might be able to trace its journey, but does he want to know? So much has been lost. The specificities hurt. He walks into the Crossroads and hopes, and the violet twist of the pocket-world soothes his eyes and a tension releases in his jaw, the set of his shoulders. Solas breathes in air he had helped June wrought, and the dead eluvians come alight. Knowledge wakens the world and casts old statues upright again, the mosaics regain their color and shimmer back into place, and old ghosts call him by his name: “An’daran a’tishan, Fen’Harel Evanuris. Enansal Vir Dirthara ean.” A gentle Curiosity embraces him, and Study smiles behind them.

He holds them close. Despite the thinness of the Veil he cannot feel them. Solas counts to keep his breath: one. Two. Three. If he stops breathing he can pretend, for a moment, that they are only modeling. If he exhales he’ll see they can’t. But the pressure is too much and he closes his eyes when he finally releases that breath. These spirits do not breath. They cannot grow: dead whispers, the lot of them.

“An’daran a’tishan, lethallin,” he says. “Ghil’Dirtharen enansal miin.” He opens his hands in gratitude, a gesture lost on the elvhen of the Dragon age. His heart clenches in his chest, and he looks down. He breathes and the pain shifts: heavy, not caustic. A weight, rather than a bleeding wound. The Archivist waits for him, as it always has. Solas is the only thing for it to reflect now. When he looks up Ghil’Dirtharen is shaping itself into his own shape. “No,” he says sharply. He will not be lead by his own fool self through the graveyard of his People. Some irony cannot be borne.

“Abelas miin,” Ghil’Dirtharen says amiably. He watches his own face recede into the spirit’s red glow, and reshape. Now it looks like his father, but with Dirthamen’s vallaslin branded sick on its spirit-flesh. “I remember,” it says. “I remember the great sculptures of June’s priests he wrought from cloud and ether, lyrium and the Sea-under-the-Earth, which once adorned these halls. I remember he wove in their robes the flash of every worker who died. I remember he hid in the books their stories. I remember the way he died.”

Solas says, “Yes. But I am not here to remember him. When I sundered the Brethren of Air from the People, where did the People die? Was there anyone to bury them?” “Hungers wastes the flesh til it’s numb, no more left to gnaw,” Ghil’Dirtharen tells him. “Of the two hundred that survived the rip of the world twelve killed themselves. Nine others offered themselves willingly, so the rest may be sustained. Five were killed in a fight for the Sylaise’s hall, in the Shattered Library. Two others succumbed to Despair. And then they began to die of Hunger. Would you like to see where I preserved them?” “Yes.” It leads him through the shattered remains of the Vir Dirthara to the ransacked shelves of the agricultural section. It is clear it has long been abandoned. Those who died here were not able to sustain life after them. No children were born to them. If he had friends here, none of their descendants fought in the petty wars that divided Elvhenan. None of them fought off Tevinter in Shartan’s rebellion. None of them were crushed by Sister Amity in the Exalted March, and none of them became the wandering Dalish. He finds the skeletons strung out by the still-smoldering remains of a campfire. He wonders what books they burnt.

Ghil’Dirtharen says, “Yours.”

“Of course,” he says. “Yes. They would.” He is surprised Dirthamen allowed a copy to remain. Solas bends down, stirs the flame a little bit. The fire rekindles. It takes a very long time for things to decay, in the Vir Dirthara. “Can you tell me who these people were?”

To his horror, he knows who these people were. The same magic that delicately preserved the dust and ashes of the Crossroads kept their decay in state as well. Scraps of dessicated flesh still stuck to their old bones. He recognized one man by the rings he wore in his elaborately-braided hair: Nuvis, the partner of a friend of his. Solas stoops over the body, touched his hair. To his horror Nuvis began to rapidly rot at his touch, flesh liquifiying. He leaps backward and went to cover his nose, but no: scraps of death had clung to his hands. Solas retches.

But he has seen countless battlefields, and he had sworn to lay his dead to rest. Solas wraps the shawl Lavellan wove him over his face and falls into the routine of moving the bodies of his followers as they disintegrate in his hands. He moves one woman too roughly, and her legs come loose from her body in his hands, fingers sinking into liquid flesh. After that, he learns to be gentle. He marks time by decay: the Crossroads still move with the shifts of the Fade, so as he perceives the end, so do the protections of the Vir Dirthara. The stench is not unbearable. He has smelled worse. He has been trapped under rotting halla, in a muddy ditch, after a charge gone wrong. That is the worst thing he has smelled. He reminds himself of this, as he holds an infant that turns to mush within its own wrappings. Someone had already swaddled it. From the embroidery of its shroud, he imagines they were Mythal’s people, stuck with some of his men. When he is done, he reaches for a prayer, but the awful blankness of grief overwhelms him and he can think nothing, see nothing, he gags over his own breath and freezes in the pure horror of _they all starved to death, surrounded by books on agriculture, waiting for me--_ Ghil’Dirtharen asks meditatively, “Would you like to hear their last words?”

“No.” He returns to Skyhold with the scent of burning flesh clinging to his clothes. Morrigan is there and opens her mouth to snarl something as he locks the Vir Dirthara from her, but when he turns around she falters and steps back. He is seething. Wordlessly he leaves the room. Back in his quarters, he draws himself a bath, throwing his clothes in a pile by the fire. He likes the rooms he and Lavellan have made their own: one room for her children, the bedroom with the bathtub for them, the rather grand sitting room and office that he kept putting off repainting. He is relieved they are not expected home until late into the night. He sinks below the water and charms it near-scalding, and scrubs at his flesh until he feels raw enough to cry.

He leans against the edge of the marble tub, cool against his cheek. It is unfair he can indulge himself in the sense, it is unfair he has a form beyond reflection and Mythal’s pain. It is unfair they died that way. It is unfair he might die better. He thinks, _i should bear the price_ and sinks lower into the water. Grieving is not wallowing in self-pity, he reminds himself. He would be as monstrous as they claimed if he were not affected. He thinks, _I should not be alive_. These are all facts. The Veil wrecked havoc equivalent to the Evanuris’ crimes. The Veil also disrupted enough of his comrades’ uthenera that it is frankly surprising that he survived, particularly as so many elves before the Imperium tried to hunt his body down.

He dozes in the water, not quite asleep. He does not deserve the comfort of the Fade. He has also learned not expose himself when he is this vulnerable. He tries not to think, moving from thought to thought: the last time he saw Nuvis, they argued, but he was arguing with everyone at the end, Imladris would be home before dawn, Blackwall will be bringing the girls back from Keeper Hawen tomorrow, he should check to see if they want time alone with their mother, Merrill wanted to know why the arulin’holm cured the Blight, but it didn’t and he needed to decide how much she needed to know and what she could not, he did not like to lie, though of course he had not lied to Marella and Nuvis when he promised them their son would survive the Veil, safe in Tarasyl’an Telas, he had been lucky that history had vindicated him for once, if Corypheus had not breached the Veil to begin with...how human, error is. How mortal, his pride. He would die soon. What had he left behind?

Imladris comes home early. He hears her at the door. Rather than leave the bath, he heats the water again. She steps in and smiles at him splayed lazily out in the tub before the fire, and he smiles softly as he hears the rustle of her clothes hitting the ground.

“May I join you?” she asks. He waves a hand in response. The tub is wide enough for him to hold her, and she sinks into his arms and he burrows his head in the crook of her neck as she undulates against him. She smells like sweat, and her hart, blood and old leather and singed hair. She is mercifully unhurt. She twists to kiss him, and as always he sinks slowly into the kiss, surrendering himself. His hand fists into her hair, he nudges her into his lap, and she’s straddling him and laughing a bit when she breaks from the kiss. Her expression changes when she meets his gaze. “Are you alright?” she asks.

His instinct is to lie. “I went to the Vir Dirthara today,” he says instead. “The...calling it a library is an understatement. But when I raised the Veil, some were trapped--because the pathways that lead to the eluvians were constructed from Fade magic. I needed to give them a proper burial.” Imladris shifts so their legs are entangled and leans him into her arms, slopping water onto the floor. The temperature is rising. She tends give off her own heat. He says, helplessly, “They began rotting as soon as I touched them, the spirits holding Vir Dirthara in stasis gave way as soon as I began to act.” She is stroking the back of his neck.

“Did you cremate them?” she asks dispassionately. “We can scatter their ashes discreetly at Skyhold. And there is the Var Bellanaris too.” He shakes his head. She caresses his face and pulls him closer. Raggedly he sighs.

“I’ll have to burn those clothes.”

“Not how I hoped I’d convince you to get rid of that tunic,” Imladris murmurs wryly. Solas barks a laugh. “Sorry, that was tasteless.”

“You’re fine,” he says. “I should stop wallowing in self-pity. I cannot bring back the dead.” She draws back and studies his face for a second, eyes narrowed. Then she kisses his forehead, and he closes his eyes as she hugs him. He can hear her heart beating steadily. “What do you do,” he murmurs, “when everyone you know is dead? When you killed them? All I can do is bury what remains.”


	15. after and the morning after

Solas remembers the first long trek through the snow, scouting for a site well-hidden and well-protected, where he could work the magic that would hold the Sky back and prevent the false gods from Blighting reality. He remembers the stone rising up to meet his feet, as if to greet him, and remembers standing at that mountain peak and understanding this would be his home, Foresight had been Mythal’s gift, and she had granted him this: Skyhold would host the most important moments of his life.

At the battlements, gazing down at the tents lining the frozen valley, Solas hears footsteps purposefully loud. He turns and Imladris Lavellan is there, staring him down like a wolf tracking a halla. He raises an eyebrow. She states, “Would you like to come over for dinner.” It is not a question. They both know the answer. He very much would like to come over for dinner. He would like to cook her and her daughters dinner; before Adamant he had promised to recreate his favorite dish from Elvhenan, one that did not requires decades of fermentation or flora and fauna now long-extinct. Since the Emprise, when it became clear he could not fight the Blight alone, the tension and hurt that sat between them has eased. She has seen his nightmares come true and soothed him through.

“I would like that, yes.” They are now only a few feet apart. At Adamant, she had struck him, raging, and he had accepted the blow. She had been gentler when they both thought he was going to die in the Emprise, when he had clutched at her and begged her not to let him die alone. He waits, and puts his hands behind his back. The next move should be hers. He has commanded the board long enough.

“Good,” Imladris says. “What are you making me?” She mimics his posture, and he laughs.

“Just you?”

“Just me.”

He stays over, of course, and leaves the Fade smiling for once, because he wakes up to her singing a hunting song, and he watches her build herself into the Inquisitor: hair tied up tightly, paint around the eyes and on her lips, a red tunic with the vhenadahl embroidered on the sleeves in white today. Imladris still wears her late husband’s halla pendant, and she tucks it under her dress, close to her skin. It is below him to feel jealous of a dead man. He has debased himself enough these days.

They leave her rooms together, hands clasped until they reach the door to the great hall, and this time he moves first, pulling her in close. They rest for a second in each other’s arms. She has changed everything. Everyone knows, she has changed everything. And as soon as they step through that door, everyone will know that yes, the elvhen apostate has crept back into the Inquisitor’s bed after Maker-knows-what happened at Adamant. Imladris sighs heavily. “Vivienne,” she informs him, “is going to rearrange all our furniture again.”

He snorts, and rubs his nose against hers. “Blackwall will attempt to corner me in the bath house to have a conversation about honor and redemption.”

"And Varric will turn this all into a bodice-ripper, and Dalish and city-elf alike will sing songs about the Dalish First who tamed the Dread Wolf and accidentally became the figurehead for a human religion, and by the time I die the stories will become so bizarre that you will be the only one to recognize me.”

Solas is silent for a second. “For what it’s worth,” he says finally, moving to open the door, “you can at least trust that some of the songs will actually be quite funny.”


	16. drunk at the winter palace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> for musetta3's prompt, "nonsexual intimacy--accidentally falling asleep on each other"

They barely manage to slip back into the Winter Palace before dawn. Lavellan takes Solas by the hand, and they creep through the servants’ passages, quiet like mice and so drunk they nearly step into the wrong mirror. Celene is dead, Briala has Gaspard by the balls, and the party in the elvhen district of Halamshiral rages on. When they finally wind their way through the corridors to Lavellan’s quarters, they come face-to-face with an amused Leliana.   
  
“I was wondering where you went,” she says.   
  
“There was a party in the Dirthaveren,” Imladris tries not to slur. Her accent comes out more Dalish than she intended. Solas is not even trying to speak. He has been drinking since the start of the ball, and it really is a miracle that he can walk straight. She thinks: no, he can’t, we walked into that wall, didn’t we.   
  
Leliana wrinkles her nose. “I can tell.” The two elves exchange a glance. Solas did get a beer thrown at him, but only because he called someone a reactionary malcontent masquerading as the zeitgeist, and it was deserved for being that articulate two bottles of wine in. He was right, that person was an asshole. Lavellan does not know why her blouse is red. It might be wine. Leliana opens the door to their rooms for them and giggles when they trip. “You’re expected at court breakfast in two hours. Try to make yourself presentable--for Josie’s sake, if not Orlais’s.” She closes the door. They fall to the floor in relief.   
  
Lavellan climbs onto Solas and noses at his neck. He squirms. “We need to sober up.”   
  
“Absolutely not,” she says, and bites his ear. He pulls at her hair, which has come totally loose. He removes a leaf from her hair and frowns. She laughs. She remembers climbing a tree, why did she climb a tree? “We need to make ourselves presentable.”   
  
Solas kisses her instead. They lose themselves in each other for a moment, then Lavellan pulls back. “Floor,” she tells him. “Bath?” He nods and hoists her up, stumbling all the way, and like a giant crab they manage to get each other to the magnificent bathroom Celene had set her. She giggles to herself. Well, she’s dead, and she has her bathtub.   
  
“I keep thinking I will sober soon,” Solas says meditatively, “and then I am just more drunk.” She pushes him into the bathtub rather than answering, and they strip and begin playing with the dials. Solas tells her the whole chronology of Dalish hydrology with the deep enthusiasm of a true obsessive, how the Orlesians adapted the pipes by using dwarven craftsmen, and what ambient spells were still functioning. The ancestors were particular fond of sulphurous mineral water, apparently. It was good for the skin, and it was important to keep as healthy as possible when you are functionally immortal. He gestures to the shadow of his receding hairline, and they contemplate trying to give him a shave.   
  
She meditatively strokes the back of his neck, lulled in the hot water, and they drift to sleep. It has been a wild night--but they have little time to dream (and for Solas to explore more Orlesian hydrology) because Josephine coughs and Lavellan splashes wildly as Solas covers his mouth. They are totally nude, still in the bath, and Josephine is impeccably dressed. The ambassador raises a single eyebrow at the scene, points to the nutcracker uniforms sitting on their untouched bed, and says, “Twenty minutes.” She leaves them collapsing in giggles, because they are still drunk, and Briala likely is too.   
  
“I have made history,” Lavellan announces, trying and failing to tie her sash. “And I almost slept through it too.”   
  
“So many treaties are written hungover,” Solas informs her. “Do you think the Emperor Reville surrendered Ferelden sober? And Andruil was lyrium-drunk when she rendered unto me the Dales.”


	17. ghilan'nain's grove

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Why are all the arches in Ghilan'nain's Grove vaguely phallic? Blackwall wants to know.

We were hunting the snowy wyvern in one of the fetid swamps the Inquisition had the misfortune to take me to, but the architecture at least was fascinating. After slaughtering and butchering the creatures, I sought a dry spot to clean my robes. I heard Sera scream behind me and Solas snicker. I sighed. I wanted Solas to answer a few questions about Ghilan'nain's Grove, and the Dread Wolf statues that littered the place, and thought it would be a good idea to expose Sera to the history of her people as well. Instead they had spent the entire trip sniping at each other. One would think a middle-aged deity would have more patience for a teenaged girl--Sera had to be barely eighteen, if that at all. But he was always tricky to read.

Blackwall sat next to me. I began to unlatch his greaves and get him out of his heavy plate. He already smelled enough, we didn't need gurgut mud adding to his general funk. "You know what this place was, Inquisitor?" he asked. "You studied archaeology, right? With the Dalish and in Orlais?"

I grunted, working at one particularly stubborn strap. The mud had already hardened over the buckle. "Oh yes. Once upon a time." Really it was the best part of this whole Herald of Andraste business--I spent too much time in decaying ruins. It would be enjoyable but for the reanimated corpses, the gurgets, the occasional screeching ancient elvhen priest revived as a demon, and of course, Corypheus ripping through the Dalish layers to get straight to the last of Arlathan.

Blackwall nodded at a particularly magnificent trefoil gateway that had to be at least as old as Solas. "Then--I have to ask this, and Solas'd probably lob a fireball at me if I asked him--"

"Tom," I dropped his arm, exasperated, "I'm not answering any questions about my sex life," while Solas was around, I did not say aloud.

I was expecting him to ask if Solas liked to fuck in ancient ruins, which he didn't, it depressed him too much, but Blackwall says, "No, no, not about that--wait, what?"

"Carry on," I said hurriedly. I caught movement in the corner of my eye. Sera had strayed too close to another pack of wyverns, and they were chasing her around while Solas watched serenely. He would freeze them once she was actually in danger. I hoped.

Blackwall gave me a look, but kept talking, "Why's the gate so--" I watched the drama play out on his face. He did not want to say "dick" or "cock" or "penis" in front of the Inquisitor. He did want to know, genuinely. And he was looking for ammunition, I knew, to get back at Solas for their next card game. Solas had won two griffon rocking chairs and half a year's wages last time Blackwall had been dared to challenge him to a match. I thought: why not? Let's stir the pot.

"Phallic?" I supplied. "Honestly, I've no idea. I could bullshit you like an Orlesian and tell you it's likely of some ritual significance, but why don't we ask Solas?"

"The elvhen artifact himself," Blackwall muttered. I heard a yelp, and turned to see Solas batting at a dragonling with his staff. Fuck: not another dragon nest. You would think the Dread Wolf would be better about not getting set on fire. Blackwall and I cleared out the gurgets and the dragonlings, and then we strayed close to the nest itself and had to run while a dragon hurled balls of lightning at us. We sprinted through the horrible swamp, squishing the whole long way back to camp.

I snarled at the requisitions officer to leave us alone and threw myself by the fire. Solas helped me take off my armored robes, and the four of us began to administer to the cuts and scraps we'd gotten on Vivienne's little errand. I was drowsing in the warmth of the fire as Solas combed the mud out of my hair when Blackwall finally said, "So, Solas, answer me this: why're all those elvhen gates dick-shaped?"

Solas jerked the comb and I winced away. "I beg your pardon?" he said.

Blackwall chortled. "Well, you have to see it. I mean--was it some ceremonial purpose?" He waggled his eyebrows. "Big space, big dick shape, what's a man supposed to think?"

Solas was silent for a moment. I exchanged a glance with Sera. Sera was grinning. Finally, Solas said reluctantly, "I suppose it makes it worse if I tell you they held mirrors." 

Blackwall cackled, and Solas sighed. He looked at mournfully. I shrugged.

"You have to admit," I said. "They are rather phallic."

"They're lotuses," he said.

"Which can be considered phallic," I countered. Solas looked at me pitifully. What did I like to do in my free time? I liked to ask my favorite elvhen artifact bad historical questions, and see how flustered I could get him. If I could deflect and get Blackwall or Sera to do it, so much the better. I settled against him and smirked as he wrapped his arms around me and tucked my head under his chin. Blackwall was still giggling to himself, muttering something about "bobbing around in the moonlight" that I decided I did not want to know.

Sera looked at us. "The ancient elves were weird, yeah?"

"Yes, da'len," Solas said. "Though one eventually outgrew the public orgies in roadways."


	18. sera's wedding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Solas navigates Sera's wedding with an infant and toddler in tow.

“Mythal’enast, Solas,” Lavellan mutters, exasperated. “I asked you to get her dressed an hour ago.”   
  
Solas wordlessly tosses a baby’s sock at her. She catches it one-handed, grimacing. Telana coos happily to herself. She hasn’t quite figured out crawling forward, preferring to propel herself backwards, but still resents any attempt to restrict her movements--and apparently, according to Cole, that includes socks. Around them clothing is scattered--two out of the three formal robes Solas owns, which he has apparently considered at length and discarded multiple times, and of course several of the little ones’ outfits. Imladris bends down to pick up the matching pair.   
  
“She doesn’t like yellow anymore,” Solas informs her. He looks at their littlest daughter askance. “I thought Sera would like it if Telana wore the socks she knitted her. But Telana has other plans. No socks.” He scoops her up, smiling. Telana whines, unhappy at the sudden perspectival change, and Solas rubs her back gently. She stops fussing and starts gumming at the leather band of Solas’ necklace. Solas grimaces: that necklace sat covering dust in a temple in the Wastes for a good two millennia, it is not meant to be a teething ring.   
  
Imladris, ever the practical one, says, “She’ll get cold. I’ll bring a pair or two with us. Blue this time. Did you get Lahtaras dressed? Where is she?”   
  
Solas turns away, ostensibly to soothe the baby but really to hide his face. He does not know where Lahtaras is. At two years old, she is much more mobile than her sister. She is, however, dressed, or at least she was the last time he saw her, before Telana decided the color yellow was revolting and began to scream.   
  
“I believe Mirwen is watching her,” he says vaguely. Mirwen would. Last he checked, she was sitting by the hearth with a book of chess puzzles and a furrowed brow--so perhaps she would not be watching Lahtaras, but maybe Lahtaras is in her vicinity. He hopes. He says lightly, “Are the girls ready?”   
  
Imladris picks up the baby bag and says over her shoulder, “Let’s find out.” Out by the hearth, Mirwen is sprawled on the floor, despite wearing her good dress, playing a chess puzzle. Solas shifts the baby to his other arm and peers at the board. Mate in three, if she doesn’t move that king’s pawn--and she will, so what is she hoping to do? Telana begins to whine, so he rubs her back soothingly. She’s teething. Hopefully they can get through the ceremony without her throwing a tantrum. Imladris used what she called gripe water to calm her older girls when they were little, but Solas does not think rubbing whiskey into a child’s gums will promise healthy development. He eyes her bag. Maybe they should bring whiskey for them.   
  
Mathalin has her half-sister in her lap and is reading her a picture-book in Orlesian Dalish. Lahtaras traces out the shape of the words with her whole hand. Mathalin looks up and smile at them, and Solas’ heart breaks a little, because they’ve grown so quickly, he’ll never get used to how fast time moves now, and if he is lucky he will live long enough to see them sit there with a child of their own, and perhaps by then Lahtaras will be better about speaking Elvhen, and there will be more than three people alive who can remember the lullabies of Arlathan.   
  
Imladris says, “Ready?” No, Solas thinks, he’s not. “Mirwen, you can’t take the book with you. And did you even comb your hair?”   
  
Mirwen looks up from the board, annoyed. “Mamae, I’m almost done.”   
  
“You can finish when we get home,” she scolds. “Come on, let’s go.” Mirwen takes her time getting up and Imladris rolls her eyes at Solas. Together they wrangle the children out the door, Imladris fussing with Mirwen’s hair, and head down to Skyhold’s cloister. Telana demands a diaper change by the time they get to the great hall, and Solas waves them on as he hurries back upstairs to clean her up.    
  
“You have inherited my sense of timing,” he tells her as she cries, “haven’t you?” He wonders if he should drink a bit too much and finally tell Sera the story of how he got into a literal magical pissing contest with Andruil and Imshael. Every time they have seen each other since Lavellan dissolved the Inquisition, she has tried to wrangle the story out of him. It will be his wedding gift to her, and doubtless she will get Maryden to put it to music and he’ll come to the next Arlathvhen to half the elves singing about that time Andruil hunted the Dread Wolf for marking her woods as his. He mulls over what details to tell her as Telana, happy now that she is dry and comfortable, settles into his shoulder. She drifts off as he heads to the garden. He spots his old companions milling about the crowd and cannot help but smile. Cassandra sees him and waves him over.   
  
“Seeker,” he greets her, fond of the habit. She is bright-eyed. Weddings always make Cassandra weepy. She cried harder than he did at his. Cassandra peeks at the baby, who snuffles in his neck.   
  
“How are you, Solas?” she asks. “She’s gotten so big!”   
  
Solas smiles, pleased with himself. He remembers being bored by his friends’ fussing over their children, two millennia and a decade ago. Of course Marella’s son was bigger than he saw him last, it had been two years: but now he understands the fuss, and why she considered every square inch of growth a personal triumph. Telana and Lahtaras both, and Imladris’ girls who keep ever sharpening, are miraculous, and he is glad to have a hand in shaping their wisdom.   
  
“She’s teething now,” he informs her. “And she chatters constantly, but we are beginning to learn what she is trying to tell us.” He reminds himself that he was bored by people boasting about their infants at dinner parties, and Cassandra will likely be too. Reluctantly he stops himself. “But she is resting now, for once. How was the journey from Kirkwall?”   
  
They catch up as the crowd swells and other late arrivals find their spots. Solas half-expects that Sera and Dagna will not show up, and will faff off to Seheron or Minrathous, anywhere where Josephine’s fury cannot reach them. He shares this theory with Cassandra, as Rainier warily approaches. Cassandra eyes him coldly and blocks him out of the conversation slightly, but does not hiss him away. Solas catches his eye: small progress. Thom steps to his side and starts making faces at the baby, who has evidently woken up.   
  
“Josephine will have her head,” Thom says. “And she’d’ve told me and maybe the Inquisitor if she’d do it.” Telana reaches out to bat his beard, and Thom chuckles. “May I?” Solas carefully transfers her to his arms, and smiles at the shocked face Telana makes. She is utterly absorbed by the beard.    
  
He sees her hand reach out, grasping, and he warns, “Watch--” but she yanks and Thom curses and suddenly the garden is full of chirping birds, a cheap Tevinter trick if he ever saw one. Telana bursts into tears. Solas says drolly, “I take it Master Pavus has appeared.” Thom hurriedly hands the baby back.   
  
“How’s Sera gonna beat that?” Thom wonders. Telana continues to scream. Luckily, so are the wedding guests.   
  
“Bees,” Cassandra says despairingly. “I bet you she’s bringing bees.”   
  
Solas carefully wraps Telana in his wolfskin and hums to her, trying to quiet her down as Rainier attempts to distract her by crossing his eyes, and he is both relieved and a little annoyed that it works. She is giggling now, safe from harm, and even Cassandra is smiling at Thom Rainier’s valiant efforts at saving the day. Dorian swans over, Lahtaras trailing adoringly in his wake, talking a mile a minute. He looks for Imladris, but she is with Josephine and Leliana, laughing. They catch each other’s eye and for a moment there is only the love he has for her, the love she bears for him--how lucky he is, to turn the punishment of survival into this blessing. He was born to give wisdom: how odd a hand fate plays, for his destiny to be fulfilled in this way. Imladris looks back at Leliana and he rejoins the conversation.   
  
“You’ve upstaged the bride,” Rainier is saying. “How is she going to top that?”   
  
“I certainly did not,” Dorian says. “But thank you for the compliment.” He peers down at Lahtaras, who is clinging to his robes and pouting. “What did you think?”   
  
“It needed more flash!” she says. She waves her hands. “Fire!”   
  
“No,” Solas says, “perhaps something more understated, da’len?” Lahtaras looks at him doubtfully.   
  
“You’re not inflicting your horrid fashion onto the next generation,” Dorian says. “The wolfskin, really. How long have you been wearing that? A hundred years?”   
  
Three millennia, but Solas is not going to tell him that. “Would you repeat that?” Solas says. “I believe the blast from your arrival damaged my hearing.”   
  
Then a gong rumbles. Cobalt-blue energy begins swirling in the garden’s gazebo, and the air fills with the scent of--beer, Solas sneezes, the whole cloister stinks of stale ale and fried fish. The magic peals off like lotus-petals and in the center, in a glorious choppy gown of plaideweave, is Sera, brandishing a bouquet. On her back is Dagna, looking slightly rumpled.   
  
“It worked!” Dagna cheers.   
  
Josephine’s sigh cuts across the silence. Laughter breaks out, Mother Giselle sets up, and the wedding properly begins.


	19. whoosh

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lavellan thinks she is going to get to set aside the morning for a long, slow exploration of her lover's body, but then she hears the whoosh of a fire spell gone wrong and outraged screaming from the other room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is dedicated to my two cats, the closest thing I have to children, who, while they haven't set the house on fire yet, have certainly found new and creative ways to interrupt my attempts to start my partner's day off right.

Lavellan slid between the sheets, settling in the crook of his arm, and Solas murmured sleepily, “What year is it?” and burrowed his nose in her hair.   
  
“Who’s counting?” She pressed her lips against his forehead, at the laughlines gathering at the corner of each eye, the side of his nose, the edge of his lips, and he turned to face her fully, eyes still closed, and tangled a hand in her hair. “Mm.” He kissed her. Lavellan wondered, vaguely, if he was quite sure who she was.   
  
He kissed the edge of her ear. “I missed you. A wisp sought me, of the mosaic Di’nan half-sketched for the great hall of Tarasyl’an Telas. And he asked...” Solas, eyes still closed, sighed.   
  
“My love?” Lavellan opened her eyes. Solas, still blind, traced a thumb over her bottom lip. “Are you alright?”   
  
He kissed her again, nipping a touch too hard at her bottom lip, and pressed her against him. She closed her eyes and let herself be pulled in, and when she opened them again he was smiling softly, eyes open.   
  
“How can I not be?” he asked. “How can I not?” Gently he caressed her face, and she turned to press a kiss in the palm of his hand, and when she looked back she pulled at the flame of desire in his eyes. She reached out and nipped at his neck, toying with the collar of his bedclothes--they learned the hard way to wear clothes in bed, after too many matters that Josephine thought needed her urgent attention--and he arched against her. She smirked into his collarbone.   
  
“Slow,” Solas said. “Slow. Please.”   
  
Lavellan snorted, and slid her hands underneath his shirt. As she was about to pull it over his head, they heard a  _ whoosh _ and a crack and a scream, and a rising wail. Solas pulled his shirt back down.   
  
“Fuck,” Lavellan said, and laid back in bed. She contemplated burying her head in the pillow. The yelling continued incoherently from the other room. Solas rolled over and began laughing.   
  
“Your children,” he said. “What do you think they’ve done now? If ever I doubted my presence in the here and now, that was banished when the screaming began. That was a flashfire spell, I believe. What do you think Mathalin set on fire?”   
  
I just wanted to fuck him, Lavellan thought mournfully. I spent a week cleaning varghests out of Griffon Wing Keep, because Cullen’s men kept getting eaten and as much as I dislike templars, it’s bad for both morale and recruitment. I just wanted to leave him burning and moaning and trembling, gasping steam rising until he got that devilish glint and traced down my spine electric--   
  
Someone knocked on their bedroom door, and they heard a shriek and a yelp, and scrapping as Lavellan’s daughters fought. Lavellan pressed her face into the pillow and moaned in frustration. Solas’ finger crept gently up the back of her neck and fisted into her hair.   
  
“I believe urgent matters require your attention,” he said mildly.   
  
“You deal with them.”   
  
“No.”   
  
Lavellan turned over slightly. She eyed him. “They listen to you.”   
  
Solas let go of her hair. “They really don’t.” Lavellan pushed herself up, and Solas smiled and kissed her suddenly. “Give me a moment, vhenan, to reacquaint myself with what year it is. I need a moment.”   
  
“Of course,” she said, frowning, and she kissed his cheek, a bit bristly, and strode to the door. She arranged her face, threw open the door, and said, “What’s going on earth? Oh, for fuck’s sake.  _ Mathalin _ .”   
  
The curtains, woven specially by the best of the Weavers’ Guild of Tantervale, smoldered gently in the breeze. Mathalin had her hands up, cringing. Her younger daughter, barely eight-years-old, was soaking wet and furious. Her hair was smoking. Between them several sad charred strips of bacon sat. Lavellan’s nose flared.   
  
“I can explain,” Mathalin said. At fourteen, she thought she could talk her way out of everything--perhaps because she spent too much time trailing Solas and Varric.   
  
Mirwen took her cue. She turned to her mother and her eyes filled with tears. “My  _ hair _ ,” she howled.   
  
Lavellan said, “I know you’re part of this, da’len. Save the theatrics.”   
  
“Okay,” Mathalin said. “I know this all looks bad, but consider the spirit of experimentation in which it was done.” Lavellan raised an eyebrow and Mathalin stopped. She really has been spending too much time with Solas, she thought.   
  
“The bacon?” Lavellan said. “The curtains? Why is your sister wet?”   
  
Mathalin looked at Mirwen significantly. Mirwen said sullenly, “It was nothing. An experiment, Mamae, just like Mathalin said.”   
  
“An experiment on what,” Lavellan stated. She heard a chortle of laughter from the other room.   
  
“Well,” Mathalin said. She looked at the sad ashen remains on the floor. “Cooking? But then I had to sneeze.”   
  
Lavellan closed her eyes and sighed.


End file.
